Cycle rides round London

ROUN

-A

\

CHARLES G. HARPER

THE LIBRARY

OF

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OF CALIFORNIA

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CYCLE RIDES ROUND LONDON

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Brighton Road: Old Times and New
on a Classic Highway.

The Portsmouth Road : And its Tributaries,
To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient
Turnpike.

The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and
Frivolity on an old Highway.

The Exeter Road : The Story of the West
of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail
Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road : An East Anglian
Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail Coach
Route to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn
Road. [In the Press.

WW' ''^

THE OLU^LYCHGATE, PENSHURST.

CYCLE RIDES
ROUND LONDON

RIDDEN WRITTEN
& ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES G. HARPER

AUTHOR OF "THE BRIGHTON ROAD" "THE PORTS-
MOUTH ROAD" "THE DOVER ROAD" "THE BATH ROAD"
"THE EXETER ROAD" "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD"
"THE NORWICH ROAD" and "THE HOLYHEAD ROAD"

London: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1902.

{All Right! Reserved)

H2.3C

PREFACE

When that sturdy pioneer^ J oJin Mayall junior, first rode
his velocipede from London to Brighton in 1869, in much
physical discomfort, and left his two would-be companions
behind him in a crippled condition, no one could have
foreseen the days when many thousands of Londoners
would with little effort explore the Home Counties on
Saturdays or zveek-ends, and ride sixty or seventy miles a
day for the mere pleasure of seeking country lanes and
historic spots.

There are, indeed, no more ardent lovers of t lie country,
of scenery, of ancient hails and churches, of quiet hamlets
and historic castles than London cyclists, zuho are often,
in fact, recruited from the ranks of those pedestrians who,
finding they could by means of the cycle extend their
expeditions in search of the venerable and the beautiful,
have cast away staff and stout walking-boots, and have
learnt the nice art of balancing astride two zvheels.

So much accomplished, the ex-pedestrian has at once
widened his radius to at least thrice its former extent, and
places that to him zcere little knozvn, or merely unmeaning
names, have become suddenly familiar. Even the sea —
that far cry to the Londoner — is within reach of an easy
summer day's ride.

viii Preface

Few have anything like an adequate idea of how rich
in beauty and interest is the country comprised roughly
in a radius of from tiventy to thirty miles from London.
To treat those many miles thoroughly would require long
study and many volumes, and these pages pretend to do
nothing more than dip here and there into the inexhaustible
resources, pictorial and literary, of the hinterland that lies
without the uttermost suburbs. •

To have visited Jordans, where the early Quakers
worshipped and are laid to rest ; to have entered beneath
the roof of the "pretty cot" at Chalfont St. Giles that
sheltered Milton ; to have seen zvith one's own eyes
Penshurst, the home of the Sidneys, and Chenies, the
resting-place of the Russells ; to have meditated beneath
the ^'■yew tree's shade " at Stoke Poges ; to have seen or
done all these things is to have done much to educate one's
self in the historic resources of the much-talked-of but
little-known countryside. The King's Stone in Kingston
market-place, Ccesar's Well on K est on Common, the
" Town Hall" at Gatton, the Pilgrims' Way under the lee
of the North Downs, and the monumental brasses of the
D'A bernons at Stoke D'A bernon have each and all their
engrossing interest ; or, if you think them to savour too
greatly of the dry-as-dust studies of the antiquary, there
remain for you the quaint old inns, the sleepy hamletSy
and the tributary rivers of the Thames, all putting forth
a never-failing charm ivhen May has come, and with it
the sunshine, the leaves and floivers, and the song of the
birds.

CHARLES G. HARPER.
Petersham, Surrey, April 1902.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Chenies and the Milton Country . . . . i

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD ..... 22

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Med way . . .36

The Darenth and the Grays ..... 53
Croydon to Knockholt Beeches and the Kentish

Commons . . . . . . .63

In Old-World Essex ...... 75

Among the Essex Hills. ..... 86

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking . . . -97

Ripley and the Surrey Commons . . . .111

Rural Middlesex . . . . ' . .121

Under the North Downs . . . . .131

The Suburban Thames ...... 155

The Southern Suburbs : Kingston to Ewell, Warlingham,

and Croydon ....... 169

Ewell to Merstham, Godstone, and Lingfield . .177

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge . . . 186

To Stoke Poges and Burn ham Beeches . . -199

Dartford to Rochester, Aylesford, and Borough Green . 218
Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways . . -231

The Back Way to Brighton . . . . -251

Barking to Southend and Sheppey .... 260

I4ST.

The Old Lychgate, Penshurst

RUISLIP , . , .

Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St. Giles

Jesus Hospital, Bray

Esher Old Church

Horseshoe Clump

Brass to Sir John D'Abernon

The Hall, Slyfield House

The "Running Horse".

Elynor Rummyng

Sign of the "Running Horse"

Crown Point

Sign of the "Sir Jeffrey Amherst"

Cromwell's Skull

Ightham Mote

The Courtyard, Ightham Mote

The Dumb Borsholder .

The Quintain, Offham ,

The Waterside, Erith .

On the Thames, near Erith .

Purfleet, from the Darenth Meadows

The Darenth

Eynesford .

The P'ool's Cap Crest of Sir John Spi

The Little Church of Woldingham

Knockholt Beeches

C/tsAR's Well

The Stocks, Havering-atte-Bower

Navestock Church

Blackmore Church

PAGE

Frontispiece
4
13
20
26
28
30 •
31
32
33
35
38
39
40

43
45
50
51
54
55
57
58
60
62
66
71
73
76

79
81

List of Illustrations

XI

Two Churches in one Churchyard: the Sister Cm

OF WiLLINGALE SpAIN AND WiLLINGALE DOE

Stock Church

Laindon Church .

Pars LOWES ....

EwELi. Old Church Tower

Evershed's Rough

Leith Hill

Claremont.

Newark Priory .

The Little Church of Perivale

Pinner ....

A Mysterious Monument

Reigate Heath .

Westcott ....

The Little Church of Wotton

Postford Ponds .

An Old Weir on the Wey

The Guildhall and High Street, Guildfori

Puttenham

The Seven-Dials Pillar, Weybridge

Pyrcroft House .

The Ruins, Virginia Water

Carshalton

Leaving Carshalton

The "Town Hall," Gatton

The Hollow Road, Nutfield .

An Iron Tomb-Slab

The Ancient Yew, Crowhurst

The Gatehouse, Hever Castle

Hever Castle

Chiddingstone

Sunset on the Eden

A Crest of the Sidneys

Shoeing Forge, Penshurst

Gray's Monument

The " Bicycle Window," Stoke Poges

At Burn ham Beeches

xu

List of Illustrations

Stone .....

Early English Doorway, Stone Church

Interior, Stone Church

High Street, Rochester

Temple Bar

Cough's Oak

Shenley Round-House .

The Church Bell, Shenley

Water End

Flamstead ....

Mackery End

The North Downs and Marden Park

The " Sackville Lodging," East Grinstead

Lewes ....

Barking ....

Eastbury House .

Hadleigh Castle .

Leigh Marshes and the Mouth of the Thames

Minster-in-Sheppey Church

Warden Point

Newington

The End ....

Sketch Maps to each Route.

PAGE
219
220
221
225

235
236

237

242

245
247

253
255
258
263
267
269
271
277
283
285

CYCLE RIDES
ROUND LONDON

CHENIES AND THE MILTON COUNTRY

Sight-seeing with ease and comfort is the ideal of
the cycling tourist, and this run into a corner of
Buckinghamshire and the Milton country comes as near
the ideal as anything ever does in a world of punctures,
leakages, hills, headwinds, and weather that is either
sultry or soaking.

Starting from Southall Station, which will probably
strike the tourist as in anything but a desirable locality,
we gain that flattest of flat highways — the Oxford road
— ^just here, and, leaving the canal and its cursing
bargees, together with the margarine works, the huge
gasometers, and other useful but unlovely outposts and
necessaries of civilisation, speed along the excellent
surface, past Hayes End and the hamlet Cockneys are
pleased to call " 'illingdon 'eath," until within a mile and
a half of Uxbridge, where a turning on the right hand
will be noticed, properly furnished with a sign-post,
pointing to Ickenham, Ruislip, and Pinner. Here we

2 Cycle Rides round London

leave the dusty high road and its scurrying gangs of
clubmen, whose faces, as they scorch along, are indicative
of anything but pleasure. It is a pleasant by-road
upon whose quiet course we have now entered, going in
a mile-long descending gradient, past the grand old
trees of Hillingdon Court overhanging the way, down
towards Ickenham. It is a perfectly safe and thoroughly
delightful coast down here, far away from the crowds,
along a lane whose leafy beauty ancf luxuriant hedgerows
might almost belong to Devonshire, instead of being
merely in Middlesex. At Ickenham, one of those
singularly tiny and curiously old-world villages that
are, paradoxically enough, to be found only in this most
populous of English counties, are a village green, a pond,
and a pump. The pond is, perhaps, not so translucent
as it might be, for the reason that the ducks are generally
busily stirring up the mud ; and the green, being mostly
loose gravel, is not so verdant as could be wished ; but
the pump, occupying a very central position, is at once
ornate and useful, and, in appearance, something between
a Chinese joss-house, a County Council band-stand, and
a newspaper kiosk. Also, it still retains on its weather-
cock the tattered and blackened flag of some loyal
celebration or another, which may mean loyalty in
excelsis or merely local laziness. The very interesting
old church, with whitewashed walls and with odd
dormers in the roof, has some excellent windows and
a little timbered spirelet that shows up white against a
dense background of trees, and is, altogether, just such
a place as Gray describes in his " Elegy," in whose
churchyard sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet.

Chenies and the Milton Country 3

Suburbia has not yet disturbed this " home of ancient
peace," and it is still worth the very earnest attention
of the artist, as also is that grand old Jacobean mansion
of Swakeleys, standing in its park, near by.

A mile onward is Ruislip, best reached by bearing to
the right at the next turning, and then sharply to the

60UTHAU.

left. Round about " Riselip," as its inhabitants call it,
they grow hay, cabbages, potatoes, and other useful, if
humble, vegetables ; and, by dint of great patience and
industry, manage to get them up to the London market.
It is only at rare intervals that the villagers ever see a
railway engine, for Ruislip is far remote from railways,
and so the place and people keep their local character.

4 Cycle Rides round London

Two or three remarkably quaint inns face the central
space round which the old and new cottages are grouped,
and the very large church stands modestly behind, its
battlemented tower peering over the tumbled roofs and
gable-ends with a fine effect, an effect that would be
still finer were it not that the miserably poor " restora-
tion" work of the plastered angles, done by that
dreadful person. Sir Gilbert Scott, is only too
apparent.

Taking the Rickmansworth road, and presently
crossing the road to Harefield, a desolate, half-ruined
modern house of large size, apparently never yet
occupied, is seen on the right. This is called St.
Catherine's End. Beyond it, on the same side, presently
appears an unobtrusive road, with an air of leading to
nowhere in particular, and, in fact, abruptly ending on
the banks of RuisHp Reservoir. The sound of
"reservoir" is not a pleasing one to those who are

Chenies and the Milton Country 5

familiar with the ugly things of that name with which
an unbusiness-like Legislature has allowed the water
companies to destroy the beauty of the suburban
Thames ; but there are reservoirs of sorts, and this
is one of the picturesque kind. The Regent's Canal
Company made it, many years ago, as a store for
refilling that waterway, and it was doubtless more than
sufficiently ugly then. But trees have since that time
partly covered the hillsides sloping down to it, and that
finest of all artists and best of landscape gardeners,
Nature, has grown rushes and water-lilies here, and
nibbled a bit out of the straight-edged bank there, until
the place looks anything but artificial. Wild birds and
wild flowers, too, render this a pleasant spot, and there
are boats even, in which one may voyage down the mile,
or less, of lake, at whose distant end the red-roofed
villas of Northwood may just be seen, whimsically like
some foreign port.

Returning to the road, the first hill of the journey
presents its unwelcome front to be climbed or walked.
Duck's Hill, as it is called, leads to an elevated tableland
where the bracken and the blackberry briars grow, and
shortly leads down again, by means of an exceedingly
steep, though short, fall through a mass of loose stones
and thick dust. The gradient and the quality of the
road-surface render this bit particularly dangerous.
Succeeding this is a more gradual descent, leading to
a right and left road. The right-hand, on a down-
grade, and one the tourist would fain follow, is not the
route, which lies, instead, to the left, and goes deter-
minedly uphill for half a mile. Just when you begin

6 Cycle Rides round London

to think this excursion is too much like taking a bicycle
out for a walking tour, it becomes possible to mount
and ride with comfort ; and then, entering Batchworth
Heath and Hertfordshire simultaneously, the lodge
gates of Moor Park are seen across a wide-spreading
green surrounded by scattered houses. It is of little
use to describe Moor Park, for the house cannot be seen
by the casual tourist, and the cyclist is not allowed in
the grounds. The place has passed through many hands,
and now belongs to Lord Ebury. It was once the
property of a certain Benjamin Hoskins Styles, a
forerunner of the modern type of financier, who had
grown suddenly rich by speculating in South Sea shares.
He caused the hills that faced the house in either
direction to be cut through, in order to provide " vistas."
He secured his vistas at a cost of i^ 130,000, which seems
a high price to pay for them ; but, according to Pope,
he also let in the east wind upon his house, and the next
owner, who happened to be Admiral Lord Anson, spent
;^8o,ooo in trying to keep it out again.

Gradual descents, and two or three sharper ones,
lead for a mile in the direction of Rickmansworth, and
then a C.T.C. danger-board shows its red warning face
over a hedge-top, just as a beautiful distant view of the
town unfolds itself below. There are those who, as a
rule, disregard danger-boards : if such they be who
wheel this way, let them be advised to make this an
exception, for it is a long and winding drop down, and
ends by making directly for a brick wall, some cottages,
and a canal ; sufficiently awkward things to encounter
on a runaway machine. Those who will not be advised.

Chenies and the Milton Country 7

and are accordingly run away with, are recommended
to choose the canal.

But the wise walk down, and, nearing the level,
mount again, and wheeling over a switchback canal
bridge and a river bridge, come happily into
Rickmansworth.

This old town resembles Watford, Ware, and Hert-
ford, but is much prettier. They are four sisters, these
Hertfordshire towns, with a strong family likeness but
minor differences. Ware is the slippered slut of them,
without doubt, and Hertford (if local patriotism will
forgive the comparison) the dowdy ; Watford the more
pretentious ; while Rickmansworth is the belle. All
are alike in their rivers and canals, their surrounding
meads and woodlands, and their breweries.

Green pastures and still waters, hanging woods and
old-world ways, render Rickmansworth delightful. One
comes into it from Batchworth Heath downhill, and,
across its level streets, climbs up again for Chenies,
reached past Chorleywood and its common, and a
succession of the loveliest parks. Chenies is a place
of pilgrimage, for the church is the mausoleum of the
Russells, Dukes of Bedford ; and if one cannot, in fact,
feel any enthusiasm for a family that has exhibited
such powers of " getting on in the world," and has
consistently used those powers of self-aggrandisement,
while professing Liberal opinions, at least the long and
splendid series of their tombs is worth seeing.

The Rozels, as they were originally named, came
over, like many other Norman filibusters, with the
Conqueror. They did not, for a long while, make any

8 Cycle Rides round London

great mark after that event, and history passes them
by until 1 506. During all those centuries, the Russell
genius for getting on lay fallow, and none of them did
anything in particular. They just vegetated on their
lands in Dorsetshire, at Kingston Russell, near Bridport,
until that year, when a quite unexpected happening
put the beginnings of promotion in their way. John
Russell, heir of the uncultivated bucolic head of the
house, had just returned from Continental travels, and
had acquired polish and the command of the French,
Spanish, and German tongues, accomplishments that
would probably have been of no sort of use to him had
it not been for the singular happening already hinted
at. In the winter of 1506 the Archduke of Austria,
voyaging from the Low Countries to Spain, was driven
by the fury of the Channel gales into Weymouth. He
was most unromantically sea-sick, and landed ; although
England was at that time no safe place for one of his
house. But he preferred the prospect of political
imprisonment to the unkindly usage of the seas.
Meanwhile, until the king's pleasure became known,
he was sheltered by Sir Thomas Trenchard of Wolveton,
near Dorchester ; and because Sir Thomas knew no
tongue but his own robust, native English, he had his
young kinsman, John Russell, over from Kingston
Russell, to act as interpreter and entertainer to the
distinguished foreigner. Young Russell proved himself
so courtly and tactful that when the Archduke visited
Henry the Seventh on a friendly invitation to Windsor
— where, instead of being clapped into a dungeon, he
was royally entreated — he spoke in such high praise

CHENIES AND THE MiLTON CoUNTRY 9

of this young Englishman that the king speedily found
him a position in the Royal Household. Thus was a
career opened up to this most fortunate young man.
He was with Henry the Eighth in France, and fought
in several battles, losing an eye at the taking of Morlaix
and at the same time gaining a knighthood. Diplomacy,
which, rather than fighting, is the Russell metier, soon
claimed him. Diplomacy, it has been well said, is the
art of lying for the advantage of one's country. Perhaps
he had not learned the art sufficiently well, for his great
mission to the Continent failed, and he returned, not
in disgrace, but, with the inevitable Russell address
and luck, to preferment. The times were fatal to
honest men, and that Russell survived that troubled
era and died in his bed in the reign of Mary, at peace,
and ennobled by the title of Earl of Bedford, enriched
with the spoils of confiscated religious houses and the
lands of attainted and executed friends, is therefore
no recommendation of his character, which was that of
a cautious time-server and cunning sycophant. He
lies here, the Founder of his house, his recumbent effigy
beside that of his countess, who brought Cheneys into the
family. It is a magnificent monument and the effigies
evidently carefully executed likenesses, even down to
the small detail of the earl's eyelid, represented as
drooping over the lost eye.

The second Earl of Bedford was a man of greater
honour and sincerity than his father, the Founder.
His monument and that of his countess stands beside
his parents' altar-tomb, and is of alabaster bedizened
to extremity with painting and gilding. He was the

lo Cycle Rides round London

first Francis of the family. The last was the man
(Francis, 9th Duke of Bedford) who poisoned himself
in 1 891.

Earl Francis, perhaps, derived his sincerity from his
mother. Both were sincere Protestants, while his
father was anything you pleased, so long as he could
keep his head on his shoulders and put more money
in his pocket. The son's Protestantism was nearly
the undoing of him, for the bloody Gardiner would
probably have sent him to the stake had he not
escaped to Geneva. When Elizabeth succeeded her
sister, he returned and served his Queen well and
truly, until his death in 1585. He was succeeded by
his grandson, Edward, who in turn was followed by
his cousin Francis ; " the wise earl," they call him,
perhaps because he found, after being released from
his imprisonment in the Tower for his political
opinions, that it was more peaceful and profitable to
busy himself about the draining of the ill-gotten Russell
lands at Whittlesea and Thorney, than to contend
with Parliament against the Crown. This is indeed
wisdom, and worthy of a Russell and a lawyer; for
as a lawyer he had been trained before his succession
to the earldom had been thought of. His son William
reproduced the shiftiness of the Founder, and luke-
warmly sided first with King, then with Parliament,
and so continually back and forth during the Civil
War. They made him a duke before he died — they,
that is to say, the advisers of William the Third — and
the price paid for it was the blood of his eldest son.
The title was given as a kind of solace for the loss

Chenies and the Milton Country i i

of that son, and must have been a bitter kind of
plaister to salve grief. That son, William, had not
the canny caution of his race, and deserves to be
honoured for the self - neglecting enthusiasm for the
Protestant religion which brought him to the block in
1683 for his alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot.

The most elaborate monument here at Chenies is that
to his father and mother, but more truly to himself ; for
that fantastic pile of theatrical statuary, exhibiting the
Duke and Countess contorted with paroxysms of grief,
leads up, as the central point of this stony emotion, to
the portrait head of this unhappy patriot who fell under
the headsman's axe.

There are other Russell monuments here, for the
family has rarely been averse from post-mortem
glorification ; but to make a catalogue of them would
be wearisome. Among the latest, and the most un-
assuming, is the plain slab to Earl Russell, — the Lord
John Russell of earlier political struggles, — who died in
1878.

Chenies village, let it at once be said, is utterly dis-
appointing, after one has heard so much of its beauties.
" A model village," no doubt, but how depressing
these model villages are ! And, indeed, the Russells rule
" Chaineys " (as it should be pronounced) with an iron
rule. The country in which it is set is beautiful, and at
the centre of the village a group of noble trees, with a
pretty spring and well-house, may be noticed ; but that
anyone can admire the would-be Tudor architecture of
the cottages, almost all rebuilt by a Duke of Bedford
about fifty years ago, is surprising. Yet there are those

12 Cycle Rides round London

who affect to do so. The village lies just off tHe road,
to the right ; and at its farther end stand the church
and the manor-house, close to one another.

" Isenhampton Cheneys " is the real name of the place,
but the Cheynes who once were paramount here are
long since extinct, and the insistent " B " is now on
every cottage, gate-post, and weathercock. The church,
rebuilt, has the whole of its north aisle appropriated as
the Bedford Chapel, so that, even here, you see how the
Russells maintain the feudal idea. Froude, indeed, says
the gorgeous monuments here are second only to the
tombs of the Mendozas, the proudest race in Spain ; but
true though that be, he is grossly fulsome when he
praises the Russells for their " Liberal " ideas. Truth to
tell, the family has ever been content to wear the
Liberal mask and yet to treat its unfortunate tenants
in a manner that many an old Tory race would have
neither the courage nor the wickedness to adopt. Ask of
the Russell tenantry what they think, and, receiving your
answer, the wonder arises how that family can keep up
their curious pretence of being " friends of the people."

Leaving Chenies, and regaining the highway to
Amersham, we wheel along until, passing under the
Metropolitan Railway at Chalfont Road Station, we take
the second turning to the left, leading to Chalfont St.
Giles. These three miles form the most exquisite part
of the whole tour, from the purely rustic point of view ;
for they lead down through sweet-scented woodlands
where the perfume of the pines and the heavy scent
of the bracken (strongly resembling that of ripe
strawberries) mingle with the refreshing odour of the

Chenies and the Milton Country 13

soil itself. Nothing breaks the stillness in the daytime
save the hoarse " crock-crock " of the pheasants, and,
when night comes, the feathered choir from the well-
named neighbouring Nightingale Woods tunes up.

Chalfont St. Giles lies down in the valley of the
Misbourne, across the high road which runs left and
right, and past the Pheasant Inn. It is a place made
famous by Milton's residence here, when he fled London

MILTON's cottage, CHAI.FONT ST. GILES,

and the Great Plague. The cottage — the " pretty cot,"
as he aptly calls it, taken for him by Thomas
Ellwood, the Quaker — is still standing, and is tho last
house on the left-hand side of the long village street.
The poet could only have known it to be a "pretty
cot" by repute, for he was blind.

Americans, perhaps more than Englishmen, make
this a place of pilgrimage ; and serious offers were
made, not so long since, to purchase the little gabled
brick and half-timbered dwelling, and to transport it to
the United States. Happily, all fears of such a fate are

14 Cycle Rides round London

now at an end ; for the parish has purchased the freehold,
and has made the cottage a museum, where the literary
pilgrim can see the veritable low-browed room where
Paradise Lost was written and Paradise Regained
suggested, together with the actual writing-table the
poet worked at. An interesting collection of early and
later editions is to be seen, with Milton portraits, and
cannon-balls found in the neighbourhood. No one will
grudge the modest sixpence charged for admission by
the parish authorities to all who are not parishioners.

The parish church still remains interesting, although
three successive restoring architects have been let loose
upon it ; and there are some really exquisite modern
stained-glass windows, as well as some very detestable
ones. Their close companionship renders the good an
excellent service, but has a very sorry effect on the bad. ~
Notice the very beautiful carved-oak communion rails,
which came from one of the side chapels of St. Paul's
Cathedral, given by Francis Hare, Bishop of Chichester
and Dean of St. Paul's. This spoiler of the metropolitan
Cathedral is buried here, and a tablet records his dignities.
Among other posts, he held that of Chaplain to the great
Duke of Marlborough, whose courier, Timothy Lovett,
by the way, who died in 1728, aged seventy years, lies
in the churchyard, beneath the curious epitaph —

" Italy and Spain
Germany and France
have been on E^arth
my weary Dance.
So that I own

Ye Graves my greatest Friend
That to my Travels
all has put an end."

Chenies and the Milton Country 15

Timothy, it is evident, was not of the touring kind
by choice.

Having seen these literary and other landmarks, we
can either regain the road, and, passing through
Chalfont St. Peter and its picturesque water-splash,
where the Misbourne crosses the road by the church,
come to the Oxford road, and by the turning to Denham
through Uxbridge into Middlesex again ; or else, braving
a very steep, stony, and winding lane, make for Jordans,
that lonely graveyard and meeting-house of the early
Quakers, where lies William Penn, founder of the State
of Pennsylvania, with many another of his sect. A left-
hand fork in the road leads toilsomely in a mile and a
half to the solitary shrouded dell where Jordans lies
hid, embosomed amid trees. It was precisely for its
solitude and comparative inaccessibility that Thomas
EUwood, the friend of Milton, with others of the Society
of Friends, purchased Jordans in 1671. They bought it
of one William Russell with the original intention of
making it merely a burial-ground, but the building of
the meeting-house soon followed.

This is the humble, domestic-looking, red brick
building the pilgrim suddenly catches sight of when
wheeling along the darkling lane. Hepworth Dixon,
writing in 185 1, says, "the meeting-house is like an old
barn in appearance," but that is scarcely correct. As a
matter of fact, it greatly resembles a stable, and indeed
is almost precisely identical in appearance with the still-
existing range of stables facing Old Palace Green,
Kensington ; buildings erected at the same period as
this.

1 6 Cycle Rides round London

The stern, austere character of the original Quakers—
Cobbett calls them " unbaptized, buttonless blackguards "
— is reflected in the look both of their burial-ground
and their meeting-house. Nothing less like a place of
worship could be imagined. Many in style — or in the
lack of style — like it are to be seen in the New England
States of the United States of America, to whose then
desolate shores many of the early Quakers carried the
creed that made them outcasts in their native land ; and
the American citizens who throng here in summer
must often be struck with the complete likeness of
the scene to many Pennsylvanian Quaker places of
meeting.

The plot where Penn and many others lie is just
an enclosed field, and not until recent years were any
memorials placed over some of their resting-places. A
dozen small headstones now mark the grave of William
Penn, the Founder of the State, and others of his
family.

Twice a year is Jordans the scene of Quaker worship,
on the fourth Sunday in May and the first Thursday in
June, when many of the faith come from long distances
to commemorative services.

Leaving Jordans, and striking the road into Beacons-
field, we reach that quietly cheerful town in another
two miles, coming into it past Wilton Park, on the
Oxford road. The little town that gave Benjamin
Disraeli his title is a singularly unpretending place, and
is less a town than a very large village. Passing through
its yellow, gravelly street, and turning to the left, when
a mile and a half out, down the Oxford road, at the

Chenies and the Milton Country 17

hamlet of Holtspur, the way to Wooburn Green and
Bourne End lies downhill, along the valley of that little-
known tributary of the Thames, the Wye, which, some
miles higher up, gives a name to High Wycombe.
Bourne End has of late years grown out of all know-
ledge, being now a place greatly favoured by those
outer suburbanites who more especially affect the
Thames ; so that new villas plentifully dot the meads
and the uplands towards Hedsor Woods and Clieveden.
And so across the Thames into Cookham and
Berkshire. Frederick Walker discovered Cookham, and
painted the common and the geese cackling across it,
long before Society had found the Thames. He died
untimely, and is buried in the old church close by ; and
since then Cookham has become more sophisticated —
pretty, of course, and equally, of course, delightful, but
not the Cookham of the seventies. But if, on the other
hand, you did not know the village then, and make its
acquaintance only now, you will have no regrets, and
will enjoy it the more. There is an odd effort at poetry
on a stone in the churchyard, which, perhaps, should not
be missed. It tells of the sudden end of William Henry
Pullen in 1813, and among other choice lines says —

""Well could he drive the coursers fleet, which oft he'd drove before;
When, turning round a narrow street, he fell — to rise no more.
No one commanded more respect, obliging, kind, and fair ;
None charged him with the least neglect, none drove with greater care.
He little thought when he arose the fatal fifth of June
That mom his life's career would close and terminate so soon."

Three parts of the road from Cookham to Maidenhead
are exceedingly dull and uninteresting ; let us therefore

2

1 8 Cycle Rides round London

take the towing-path, and cycle along that, ignoring,
like everyone else, the absurd prohibition launched a
few seasons ago by the Thames Conservancy. Not
hurrying — that would be foolishness ; for although the
river is well-nigh spoiled by Boulter's Lock, it is still
lovely all the way to Cookham, with the most glorious
views of Clieveden Woods, rising, tier over tier, on the
opposite shore. Here too, of course, have been changes
since first Society, and then the Stage, discovered the
river a few years ago, and bungalows are built on the
meadows; but we must needs be thankful that they
were built in these latter days, now that the hideous
villas of forty years since are quite impossible.

Nearing Maidenhead, and coming to the Bath road,
running right and left, we turn to the right and then down
the first road to the left (Oldfield road), then the next
two turnings in the same direction, when the old tower
of Bray Church comes in sight ; that Bray celebrated
for its vicar immortalised in the well-known song, who,
when reproached with being a religious trimmer and
inconstant to his principles, replied, " Not so ; for I
always keep my principle, which is to live and die the
Vicar of Bray." Simon Alleyn was the name of this
worthy, who lived, and was vicar, in the reigns of
Henry vill., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth.

First a Papist, he kept his place by becoming a Protes-
tant, recanting when Mary came to the throne, and again
becoming a Protestant under Elizabeth. Called apostate,
renegade, turncoat, and denier of Christ, modern times
would give him the kindlier name of " opportunist." At
anyrate, his opportunism was successful, for he held office

Chenies and the Milton Country 19

from 1540 to 1588. The ballad originated in 17 12, in a
song entitled " The Religious Turncoat ; or, the Trimming
Parson," which refers to no particular place or person,
and has no fewer than eighteen verses, quite distinct
from the modern ballad. Thus they run, for example : —

"I lov'd no king in 'Forty-one,
When Prelacy went down ;
A cloak and band I then put on,
And preached against the Crown.

When Charles returned into the land,

The English Crown's supporter,
I shifted off my cloak and band

And then became a courtier.

When Royal James began his reign,

And Mass was used in common,
I shifted off my Faith again,

And then became a Roman."

These verses, it will be noticed, place the trimming
story a hundred years later.

The churchyard is entered by a lich-gate with a
curious old house over it. In the church itself is a
monument to William Goddard, the seventeenth-century
founder of Jesus Hospital, and Joyce, his wife. That
celebrated old almshouse stands on the road as we leave
Bray for Windsor. It is a quaintly gabled, red brick
building, with a statue of the founder in an alcove over
the entrance. A central courtyard has little dwellings
ranged round it, and a rather striking chapel, familiar
in Frederick Walker's famous picture, the " Harbour of
Refuge," painted here in 1871-72. Unfortunately, those
who are familiar with that beautiful picture (now in the

20

Cycle Rides round London

National Gallery) will be disappointed on seeing the
real place, for the painter has quite idealised Jesus
Hospital, and has imagined many details that have no
existence.

Beyond the hospital, a turning to the left leads to
Windsor, past Clewer. Windsor bulks hugely from these

JESUS HOSPITAL, BRAY.

levels, with huddled houses and the towering mass of
the castle lining a ridge above the Thames ; the Round
Tower, grim and terrible in other days, merely, in these
times, a picturesque adjunct to the landscape.

It seems, indeed, that everywhere in these days the
iron gauntlet has given place to the kid glove ;
persuasion is, nowadays, more a mental than a physical
process. Only at Windsor these things take higher
ground ; here for persuasion in this era read diplomacy.

Chenies and the Milton Country 21

where it had used to be a blood-boltered performance,
in whose dramatic course axe and chaplain took
prominent parts. The castle survives, its medietval
defences restored for appearance sake, but its State
Apartments filled with polite furniture, dreadfully
gilded and tawdry. It makes a picture, this historic
warren of kings and princes ; but alas for picturesqueness,
Henry the Eighth's massive gateway is guarded to-day
— not by an appropriate Yeoman of the Guard, but
by a constable of that singularly unromantic body — the
police !

If one is wise, one does not visit Windsor for the sake
of the State Apartments, but for the external view of
the castle, set grandly, like a jewel, amid its verdant
meads. The meads form the most appropriate fore-
ground ; the proper time, either early morning or
evening, for then, when the mists cling about the river,
and the grass is damp with them, that ancient palace
and stronghold, that court and tomb of Royalty, bulks
larger than at any other hour, both on sight and mind.
And, having thus seen Windsor aright, you cannot but
return well pleased.

SURBITON TO LEATHERHEAD

SURBITON, that great modern suburb of Kingston, can
conveniently be made the starting-point of many pleasant
runs through Surrey. Let us on this occasion start from
Surbiton Station, and, making for the high road that
runs to Ripley, turn to the left at Long Ditton, where
the waterworks are, and so in a mile to the first
semblance of rusticity at that well-known inn, the "Angel
at Ditton," as it is generally called by the many cyclists
to whom for years this has been a rallying - place ;
although this is not Ditton at all, and its real name the
not very romantically-sounding one of " Gigg's Hill
Green." We pass the " Angel " on the left ; on the .
right hand stretches the pleasant Green, with roads
running away in the same direction to the village of
Thames Ditton, a mile away, and worth seeing for
those who have the exploring faculty well developed.

But to continue straight ahead, we pass Gigg's Hill
Green only to come to other and larger commons —
Ditton Marsh and Littleworth Common respectively —
along a road straight and flat for a considerable distance,
passing under the long tunnel-like archway of the London
and South- Western main line, and emerging from it to a
full view of beautiful Esher Hill, a mile and a half away,
while away on the left stretch miles of open country.

22

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 23

Notice outside a modern, dry, and dusty-looking inn,
called the " Orleans Arms," a tall, circular stone pillar
about ten feet in height, with names of towns along the
road, and the distances to them, carved on it. This is
familiarly known as the " White Lady," and dates back
to the coaching age ; for this was the old road to
Portsmouth, and was once crowded with traffic.

From this point it is a mile of continuous, though
gentle, rise to Esher village — Sandown Park racecourse
on the right, under the hill. Notice the very highly
ornamental iron gates and railings of the park : a
romantic history belongs to them. They came from
Baron Grant's palatial mansion of Kensington House,
built but never occupied, and then demolished, which
stood in Kensington Gore.

Kensington House is now quite forgot, and on its
site rise the stately houses of Kensington Court. It was
in 1873 that Baron Grant, bloated with the money of
the widow and the orphan, plundered from them in his
Emma Mine and other rascally schemes, purchased the
dirty slum at Kensington then known as the " Rookery,"
and set about building a lordly pleasure-house on its
site. Just as it was finished, his career of predatory
finance was checked, and he never occupied the vast
building. For years it remained tenantless, and was
then demolished. " Grant," as he called himself, died
obscurely in 1 899. He had in his time been the cause
of the public losing over ^20,000,000 sterling. The
Daily News spoke of him as an Irishman, but it will
readily be conceded that his real name of Gottheimer
is not strikingly Hibernian. He was, it is true, born in

24

Cycle Rides round London

SURBITOr*

Dublin. So was Dean Swift: but, as the Dean himself
remarked, to be born in a stable does not prove one to
be a horse.

Although " Grant " died obscurely, and his name and
his schemes had long before that time become discredited,
it must not be supposed that he was personally ruined
with the wreck of his projects. Not at all. He lived
and died very comfortably circumstanced, while many
of his creditors remained unsatisfied. He could pay

debts when he chose, but
when he chose not to, there
were no means of compel-
ling him. Where have we
heard the same story in recent
years ?

Esher, up along the hill, is
a pretty village, with many
and varied associations and
an extraordinary number of
curious relics. It is a charm-
ingly rural place, with a
humble old church behind an old coaching inn, and
a new church, not at all humble, across the way. The
old church and the old inn — the " Bear," they call it —
are both extremely interesting. In the hall of the inn,
placed within a glass case, secure from the touch of the
vulgar, are the huge boots worn by the post-boy who
drove Louis Philippe, the fugitive King of the French, to
Claremont in 1848. They are huge jack-boots closely
resembling the type worn by Marlborough and his
troopers at Blenheim, Ramilies, and Malplaquet.

STOKt: ■D'ABER^fON

LEATHERMEfl'D

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 25

" Mr. Smith " — for under that plebeian disguise the
Citizen King fled from Paris — resided at Claremont by
favour of Queen Victoria, and died there two years later.

Claremont is an ominous place, with a tragical cast
to its story. Most of those connected with it have been
unfortunate, if not before they sought the shelter of
its ill - omened roof, certainly afterwards. Clive, the
"heaven-born general," who built it, shot himself; the
newly married only child of George the Fourth — the
ill-fated Princess Charlotte — died there, under somewhat
mysterious circumstances ; and the Duke of Albany, who
had not long been in residence, died untimely in the
south of France, in 1884.

The old church of Esher, long since disused and kept
locked and given over to spiders and dust, has a Royal
Pew, built for the use of the Princess Charlotte and the
Claremont household in 1816. It is a huge structure,
in comparison with the size of the little church, and
designed in the worst possible classic taste ; wearing,
indeed, more the appearance of an opera -box than
anything else.

The authorities (whoever they may be) charge a
shilling for viewing this derelict church. It is distinctly
not worth the money, because the architecture is con-
temptible, and all the interesting monuments have
been removed to the modern building, on a quite
different site, across the road.

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the
death of the Princess Charlotte in her eighteenth year
made a vast difference in English history — or, at least,
English Court history. Had she survived, there would

26

Cycle Rides round London

have been no William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria
would never have been queen. Think of it ! No
Victorian Era, no Victoria Station, no Victoria Embank-
ment, no Victoria in Australia, no Victoria in Vancouver
Island ; and, in short, none of those thousand things and
places " Victoria " and " Victorian " we are surrounded

ESHER OLD CHURCH.

with. None of those, and certainly no Albert Halls,
memorials, streets, and places commemorative of that
paragon of men.

The reflections conjured up by an inspection of
Esher old church are sad indeed, and the details of it
not a little horrible to a sensitive person. There is an
early nineteenth-century bone-house or above-ground
vault attached to the little building, in which have been
stored coffins innumerable. The coffins are gone, but

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 2']

many of the bony relics of poor humanity may be seen
in the dusty semi-obscurity of an open archway, lying
strewn among rakes and shovels. To these, when the
present writer was inspecting the place, entered a fox-
terrier, emerging presently with the thigh-bone of some
rude forefather of the hamlet in his mouth. " Drop it ! "
said the churchwarden, fetching the dog a blow with
his walking-stick. The dog " dropped it " accordingly,
and went off, and the churchwarden kicked the bone
away. I made some comment, I know not what, and
the churchwarden volunteered the information that the
village urchins had been used to play with these poor
relics. " They're nearly all gone now," said he. " They
used to break the windows with 'em." And then we
changed the subject for a better.

The "new" church — new in 1852 — is a very imposing
one, also with its Claremont Royal Pew, very like a
drawing-room, built on one side of the chancel, high
above the heads of the vulgar herd, who often, when
the church is open, climb up the staircase to it, and,
.seating themselves on the chairs, go away and boast of
having sat on the seats honoured by the great — thereby
proving the vulgarity aforesaid.

The church was built chiefly from the accumulated
funds of a bequest anciently left to Esher. This was
the piece of land now called Sandown Park and the site
of the well-known racecourse, let to the racecourse
company at an annual rent. Not until 1899 did it occur
to the Vestry that for the Church to be the landlord of
a racecourse was a rather scandalous state of affairs,
and the sanction of the Charity Commissioners was

28

Cycle Rides round London

then sought and obtained for a scheme to sell the land
outright for ;^ 12,000, this sum to be invested in Consols.
These tender consciences obscured the business side of
the question, for the land, if not already worth more than
that sum, very shortly will be, considering the spread of
London's suburbs. It is rather singular that this freer
hold, bequeathed so long ago, was once the site of the
forgotten Priory of Sandown, which would appear never

HORSESHOE CLUMP,

to have been revived after its Prior and all the brethren
perished in the great pestilence, the Black Death, that
almost depopulated England in the Middle Ages,

Leaving the village behind and pursuing the
Portsmouth road, the woodlands of Claremont Park
are left behind as we come downhill towards Horse-
shoe Clump, a well-known landmark on this road.
This prominent object is a semicircular grove of firs on

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 29

the summit of a sandy knoll, looking over the valley of
the Mole, the "sullen Mole" of the poets, flowing in
far-flung loops below, on its way to join the Thames at
Molesey. This is a switchback road for cyclists thus far,
for the ridge on which Horseshoe Clump stands is no
sooner gained than we go downhill again, and so up
once more and across the level " fair mile," to descend
finally into Cobham Street, where the Mole is reached
again. Here turn to the left, along a road marked by
a sign-post " Church Cobham," the original village, off"
the main road, of which Cobham Street on the Ports-
mouth road is only an offshoot developed by the
traffic of old road-faring days. Church Cobham has,
besides its ancient church and ** Church Stile House," a
picturesque water-mill and mill-pond beside the road.
Beyond, in two miles, the tiny village owning the odd
name of Stoke D'Abernon is sighted ; village in name
only, for the church and a scattered house or two alone
mark its existence. The Norman family of D'Abernon
gave their name to this particular Stoke, originally a
primitive British stockade, or defensible camp, at a ford
on the Mole.

For the happily increasing class of tourists who are
interested in archasology, let it be noted here that the
chancel of this church contains the earliest monumental
brass in the kingdom, the mail-clad effigy of Sir John
D'Abernon, dated 1277.

Many of his race, before and after his time, lie here.
The life-sized engraved figure of this Sir John, besides
being the earliest, is also one of the most beautiful.
Clad from head to foot in a complete suit of chain mail,

30

Cycle Rides round London

his hands clasped in prayer, heraldic shield on one arm,
his pennoned lance under the other, and his great two-
handed sword hanging from a broad belt outside the
surcoat, this is a majestic figure. His feet rest on a

writhing lion, playfully repre-
sented by the engraver of the
brass as biting the lance-shaft.
A second Sir John D'Aber-
non, who died in 1327, son of
the first, also has his life-sized
memorial engraved on brass.

Stoke " Dabbernun," as the
rustics call it, is at once ex-
hausted of interest when its
church has been seen.

The road now crosses the
Mole by an old red brick
bridge, and leads up a gentle
rise to Slyfield Farm, a very
picturesque old farmstead of
red brick, designed in the
classic style prevailing in the
reign of James the First.
This was once the manor-
house of the now extinct Sly-
field family. Fair speech and
presentation of a visiting-card
may generally be relied upon to secure the courtesy of
a glimpse into the hall of this interesting old house,
where an ancient massive carved -oak staircase may
be seen, still guarded by the original " dog-gates "

BRASS TO SIR JOHN d'aBERNON,

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD 3 1

that in the times of our forebears kept the hounds in
their proper place below stairs.

THE HALL, SLYFIELD HOUSE.

The road now winds pleasantly through the valley,
but not within sight of the river until past the outlying
houses of the little village of Fetcham. On gaining the
point where the road from Great Bookham to Leather-
head falls into the one we are following, look out for
an unassuming left-hand turning past the railway arch,
leading in a hundred yards to Fetcham mill-pond.
This is a lovely spot, where the wild-fowl congregate,
and well worth halting at on a summer's day, but
tucked away so artfully that it will scarce be found save
by asking. It is a long sheet of water, with reeds, and
an island in the middle, and a peep back towards
Leatherhead from the farther end, where the church
tower peers above the trees. Flocks of moor-hens, a few
couples of stately swans, and some domestic ducks form

32

Cycle Rides round London

the invariable feathered company of the pond, and not
infrequently the coot takes up his quarters here, with
myriads of dabchicks ; the great swans and little dab-
chicks, swimming together on the water, forming the
oddest of contrasts : the swans like warships and the
dabchicks like little black torpedo-boats.

Cycles can be walked along the path to the far end of
the pond, where the road is reached again.

THE " RUNNING HORSE.

Leatherhead itself lies off to the left, less than half a
mile distant, reached by a many-arched bridge straddling
athwart the Mole, here a divergent and sedgy stream
broken up by osier aits. On the other side of the bridge
stands that crazy old inn, the " Running Horse," claiming
a continued existence since the fifteenth century and

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD

33

to have been the scene of the celebrated " tunning of
Elynor Rummyng " ; but, like the silk stocking so long
and so often darned with worsted that no trace of the
original material remained, the " Running Horse " has in
all these six centuries been so repaired here and patched
there that he would be a bold man who should dare
swear to a fragment of that old house remaining.

Elynor Rummyng was a landlady who flourished in
the time of Henry the Seventh. Skelton, poet-laureate

EI.YNOR RUMMYNG.

of that day, in a long rambling set of rhymes, neither
very elegant nor very decent, describes her and her
customers at great length. As for Elynor herself, he
says she was so ugly that

" Her visage it would assuage
A man's courage.
Her loathly leer is nothing clear,
But ugly of cheer, droupy and drowsy,
Scurvy and lousy, her face all bowsy," —

with much else in the uncomplimentary kind.
3

34 Cycle Rides round London

She was, Skelton goes on to say, " sib to the devil " ;
she scraped up all manner of filth into her mash-tub,
mixed it together with her " mangy fists," and sold this
hell-broth as ale —

" She breweth nappy ale
And makes thereof port-sale

To Travellers and Tinkers, to Sweaters and Swinkers
And all good ale-drinkers."

There is no accounting for tastes, and, reading Skelton,
it would seem as though the whole district crowded to
taste the unlovely Elynor's unwholesome brew, bringing
with them all manner of goods —

" Insteede of quoine and mony, some bring her a coney,
And some a pot with honey ; some a salt, some a spoone,
Some their hose, some their shoon ; some run a good trot,
With skillet or pot ; some fill a bag full
Of good Lemster wool ; an huswife of trust
When she is athirst, such a web can spin
Her thrift is full thin.

Some go straight thither, be it slaty or slidder,
They hold the highway, they care not what men say.
Be they as be may. Some, loth to be espied,
Start in at the backside, over hedge and pale,
And all for good ale.
Some brought walnuts,

Some apples, some pears, and some their clipping-shears ;
Some brought this and that, some brought I wot ne'er what,
Some brought their husband's hat," —

and then, doubtless, there was trouble in the happy home.
Why the crowd resorted thus to tipple the horrible
compound does not appear : one would rather drink the
usual glucose and dilute sulphuric acid of modern times.
The pictorial sign of the old house still proudly declares —

" When Skelton wore the laurel crown
My ale put all the alewives down,"

SURBITON TO LeATHERHEAD

35

To do that, you would think, it must needs have been
both good and cheap. Certainly, if the portrait -
sign of Elynor be anything like her, customers did
not resort to the " Running Horse " to bask in her
smiles, for she is represented as a very plain, not to
say ugly, old lady with a predatory nose plentifully
studded with warts.

Leatherhead is a still unspoiled little town, beside
its " mousling Mole," as Drayton calls that river.
" Mousling," probably because of the holes, or " swallows,"
as they are called, into which this curious river every
now and again disappears, like a mouse, as the poet
prettily expresses it.

P £v,i,Lij::) M! L. . ■ : ,
SIGN OF THE "RUNNING HORSE."

IGHTHAM MOTE AND THE VALE
OF MEDWAY

From Sevenoaks, on the South-Eastern Railway, let
this tour be begun ; from that Sevenoaks Station
rejoicing in the eminently cricketing name of " Bat
and Ball." There are reasons sufficiently weighty why
the starting-point should not be fixed nearer London,
chief among them being the hilly nature of the way.
Sevenoaks itself, quite apart from the rather unin-
teresting character of its long street, does not bulk
largely in the affections of the outward-bound wheel-
man, for to reach it one has a more than mile-long
climb. But, setting our faces eastward, and avoiding
Sevenoaks town, an easier beginning presents itself
along the road to Seal, where, leaving behind the trim
gardens and modern villas that form a kind of suburban
and secular halo around the railway, we plunge into a
woodland district.

Seal village is a harbinger of the Thoreau-like solitudes
that succeed along the road to Ightham, standing as it
does at the gates of Seal Chart, where, away from the
road on either hand, stretch such crepuscular alleys of
murmuring pines that even Bournemouth itself never
knew. Does there exist a cyclist who can hurry along
this road and not linger here, to rest his trusty steed

36

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 2>7

against the corrugated stem of one of these aromatic
giants of the forest, and listen to the intoning of
the wood pigeons in the cathedral - Hke half-lights?
If such there be, surely he merits the Tennyson ian
description, " a clod of thankless earth." The far-
spreading woods are unfenced and quite open to the
road for one to wander in at will, and never a sound
in their solitudes but belongs to the woodlands
themselves ; the cooing of the pigeons, and the
rustling of some " sma' wee beastie " disturbed by
the crackling of the dry twigs under your feet. The
squirrels themselves are noiseless and, to the un-
practised eye, invisible; but there are many of them
overhead, running with lightning speed along the
red-brown branches of the pines that so accurately
match the rust-red hue of their fur, and so help to
conceal them from casual observation.

Following the road and the woods for two miles,
the highway dips sharply, and takes a left curve just
where you glimpse the blue smoke rising from the rustic
chimneys of a wayside inn, down on whose lichened
roof you look in descending. To dismount here, just
as the view begins to disclose itself, is the better way,
for only thus will you be in full receipt of the beauty
and the exquisite stillness of the scene. The woods
recede, like some clearing in a Canadian forest, and,
standing back from the road, you see the inn whose
roof-tree was first disclosed. On the other side of the
highway, swinging romantically from the branches of a
great Scotch fir, is the picture-sign of the house, bear-
ing the legend, " Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Crown Point," and

38 Cycle Rides round London

showing the half-length portrait of a very determined-
looking warrior, clad in armour and apparently deep
in thought ; while in the background is a broad river,
across whose swift current boat-loads of soldiers, in the
costume of two centuries ago, are being rowed.

The scene — the old inn, with the smoke curling

CROWN POINT.

peacefully upwards against the blue-black background
of the pine-woods, and the picturesque sign swinging
with every breeze — is a realisation of the places
pictured in the glowing pages of romantic novelists.
If one were only a (ew years younger, and conventions
had not come to curb one's first impulses, there would
be no more suitable spot than this where to become an

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 39

amateur Red Indian, or one of the robber chiefs suitable
for such a spot.

The place has rather a curious story. " Crown
Point," as it is generally called, is so named after a
place in Canada where Sir Jeffrey Amherst gained a
great victory over the North American Indians early
in the eighteenth century. Amherst eventually became

S^JtFfRtV AMHERST.

SIGN OF THE "SIR JEHREY AMHEKsT

Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief to the Forces,
and, retiring and settling in Kent, founded the family
of whom the present Earl Amherst is the head. The
scenery here is said to greatly resemble that of Crown
Point in Canada. The sign of the inn is repainted and
kept in repair by Earl Amherst.

It may be worth noting that an historical relic is

40 Cycle Rides round London

preserved in the immediate neighbourhood of this
place ; no less important an one, indeed, than the
skull of Oliver Cromwell, now in the possession of
Mr. Horace Wilkinson. Much discussion has arisen
respecting it, but there seems no room for doubting
that this is the veritable skull (or, rather, mummified

C RO M WE L L S SKULL,

head) of the Protector. The relic has a pedigree that
traces it back to the stormy night when it was blown
off the roof of Westminster Hall, where it had been
exposed on a spike after the Restoration. The rusty
spike still transfixes it, and on the dried cranium the
reddish brown hair is yet to be seen. It has had many
odd adventures. Picked up by a sentry on duty at

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 41

Westminster Hall, it was concealed under his cloak, and
afterwards secretly disposed of to some of Cromwell's
descendants, coming, many years later, into the pos-
session of a travelling showman, from whom it was
purchased by a relative of the present owner.

Ightham village, to which we now make our way,
must by no means be confounded with Ightham Mote,
two miles distant from it southward, past the hamlet
of Ivy Hatch. Steeply up, and as steeply down, with
intervals of welcome flatness, goes the road to the
village, always through the pine-woods, and here and

SEAL

Cn>wri ^i

IGHTHAM

iSeuf/rpa/fl Stat'^

ICHTHAM _

^°'^^ SHIPBORNE^

there the way is overhung with little craggy cliffs of
yellow sand and gravel, as yet untouched by the road-
surveyors of the County Council, who will doubtless
some day trim away all these rustic selvedges of the
forest, and curb and bank them in a straight line.
What will the artists do then? Meanwhile, one still
has here just one of those characteristic scenes Morland
and his school so loved to paint — the hollow road with
its steep banks, in whose crumbling earth the great
wayside trees have secured what looks like a precarious
footing, and the sandy earth where the moles and the
rabbits burrow deep amid the gnarled roots. Up on
the hillside that looks down upon the road is Oldbury,

42 Cycle Rides round London

a Roman encampment, called by antiquaries the
" Gibraltar of Kent " ; but we will take the tales of
its strength on trust, for a bicycle is no aid in exploring
hilltop fortifications.

Ightham is a village that looks as though it had
at some time aspired to become a town, so urban in
character are some of its houses ; urban, that is to say,
in no ill sense. There is, for instance, the so-called
" Town House," one of the most beautiful and dignified
architectural compositions of that late seventeenth or
early eighteenth century character which in its Renais-
sance ideals makes so thorough a departure from the
older English Gothic models. By " Town House " you
are to understand a building devoted to public purposes ;
what we should, nowadays, more grandiloquently term
a " Town Hall." There was a time when Ightham
bade fair to take on a new era of importance, in the
early days of cycling, when it enjoyed a great popularity
that was stolen away by Ripley, nowadays itself in the
cold shade of neglect.

Turning to the right out of Ightham, through the
pretty hamlet of Ivy Hatch, the Mote House is reached
in two miles of shady lanes. Like many another old
English house, Ightham Mote is tucked away coyly
from the sight of the casual wayfarer. Looking dili-
gently, you see it on the left hand, on coming down
into a hollow, just a glimpse of its magpie black and
white north front glimmering through the surround-
ing woods. It is one of the earliest of the fortified
manor - houses, something between a castle and a
residence, built when people had greater ideas of

IGHTHAM MOTE.

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 45

comfort than obtained when the Edwardian strong-
holds were erected, and yet before it was safe to build
a house incapable of defence. Nowadays one finds a
preference for an open, breezy situation ; in those times,
if they did not build upon sites difficult of access in one
way they did in another ; if they did not select a rocky
crag they sought some oozy hollow, where, with some

THE COURTYARD, IGHTHAM MOTE,

little ingenuity, it was possible to form a broad moat by
damming the surrounding streams. This was the resort
adopted here, and in Ightham Mote to-day one sees the
original idea of a watery girdle, from whose inner sides
rise defensible walls enclosing a courtyard. The only
way across this moat was by a drawbridge, now replaced
by masonry, the drawbridge defended by the still-
remaining entrance-tower. Originally the ornamental

46 Cycle Rides round London

part of the residence was strictly kept within the
courtyard. The walls looking outward were either
blank or else very sparingly provided with window
openings. Later centuries have somewhat altered this,
and the picturesque, half-timbered gables and outbuild-
ings tell a tale of increasing security. There are those
who will have it that Ightham Mote is the most
picturesque old house in England, Perhaps it is, for
its moss-grown stone walls, going sheer down into the
clear water of the moat, its nodding, peaked gables,
reflected in that beautiful ceinture, and the mellow red
of the old brick entrance-tower, form a wonderful picture.
Five hundred years have passed, and it is still a home.
The tapestried hall, with its boldly timbered roof, yet
forms the central point of the house, and the bedrooms
where the Selbys, the old-time owners, slept for many
generations are in use in these latter times. Modernity
has crept in with regard to the essentials of comfortable
living, but nowhere does it appear to mar the perfect
old-world beauty of the place.

The imaginative may yet, without much difficulty in
the mental exercise, people the quaint paved courtyard
with the conventionally fair ladies and gentle knights
of the age of chivalry ; those ladies who, to judge by
the works of the Old Masters, were so extremely plain,
and those knights who could teach the tiger and the
hyaena something in ferocity. Not that the old owners
of Ightham Mote were men of this kind. Their old
home plainly tells us they were not, desiring rather a
peaceful seclusion than the ambitions and contentions
of courts and camps. Defence, not defiance, was the

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 47

watchword of those who lived in this picturesque hollow,
barred in at night from the chances, surprises, and
alarums of the riotous outer world.

The interior arrangements include original fireplaces,
carved and painted ceilings, and a chapel. The grounds
without and the forest trees beyond are green and
luxuriant beyond belief outside the wonders of fairy
tales — to whose realms, indeed, Ightham Mote more
nearly belongs than to this workaday world. The moat,
fed by a crystal stream, is clear and sparkling, and birds
and butterflies skim over it and into the thickets of
shrubs and wild flowers like so many joyous souls
escaped from a life of care and pain to rejoice for ever
and ever in sunshine and a careless existence. It is
with a sigh that the Londoner turns away from a place
whose loveliness fills him with a glorious discontent.

Many of the Selbys lie in Ightham Church, and
some have their memorials in the little domestic chapel
attached to the Mote House. Dame Dorothy Selby
was a very phcenix of all the virtues, if we may believe
her epitaph, wherein she is compared with a number of
notable biblical characters, all very edifying.

The monument to her "pretious name and honor"
is still to be seen on the chancel wall of Ightham
Church. She appears to have been a person of many
accomplishments. Firstly, a needlewoman of consider-
able parts —

" She was a Dorcas
Whose curious Needle turn'd th' abused Stage
Of this leud World into the golden Age ;
Whose Pen of Steele, and silken Inck enroU'd
The Acts of Jonah in Records of Gold."

48 Cycle Rides round London

Then it is claimed for her that she discovered the
Gunpowder Plot, in these words —

"Whose Arte disclos'd that Plot, which, had it taken,
Rome had tryumph'd and Britan's walls had shaken."

Moreover —

" She was

In heart a Lydia ; and in tongue a Ilanna.

In Zeale a Ruth : In Wedlock a Susanna,

Prudently simple, prouidently Wary ;

To th' World, a Martha : and to heauen, a Mary.

Who put on) . , r , (Pilgrimage 69 March 15.

^ ,. >■ in the yeare of her -{,, , / „

Immortality) (Redeemer 1641.

O rare and most estimable dame, paragon and phoenix,
and very Gorgon of all the virtues, how little are your
qualities hid in this, your epitaph !

She looks all those things and more, in her marble
bust, that with thin, sharp-pointed nose, and with drawn-
down mouth, gives her a very vinegary expression.
There can be little doubt of it, the old lady was that
terrible creature, the Superior Person.

There is, opposite this worthy lady's monument, the
stone effigy of a very much earlier inhabitant of the
Mote — Sir Thomas Cawne, who died in 1374. He is
represented in armour, his calm face peering out of
his hauberk and chain mail. The window to his
memory, over his tomb in the north chancel wall, made
according to the directions in his will, still remains.

There will, doubtless, be those who, resting content
with Ightham Mote, will decline to follow these wheel-
marks farther, for such a place is worth lingering over.
For the insatiable sight-seer who will proceed, the

Ightham Mote and the Vale of Medway 49

way lies as straight ahead as the winding lane will
permit to Shipborne, where we turn to the left, passing
through the village, and then, in little over a mile, to
the right, at the cross-roads, going, with Frith Woods
on the left and Dene Park on the right, for two miles
farther, turning left where a sign-post points to Hadlow.
Many hollows are descended into on the way, where
tiny streams run across the wooded roads, and there
are correspondingly sharp rises.

Mereworth village, on the borders of the wide-
spreading Mereworth Woods, lies up a turning to the
right, on the fine broad road leading to Maidstone.
Mereworth is remarkable for its hideous church, re-
sembling some of Wren's City of London churches;
with a classical colonnaded porch, windows like those
of a factory, and great overhanging eaves, very like
those of that " great barn," St. Paul's, Covent Garden.
A tall steeple, with classic peristyle, completes the
outward composition. Now turn to the interior ; an
even more pagan sight than the exterior prepares the
stranger for. It is like a huge room, and is divided
into nave and aisles by plaster pillars, painted and
grained to resemble marble, with all the fittings in
a correspondingly classic style. This objectionable
building owed its origin in 1748 to the eighth Earl of
Westmoreland, whose seat, Mereworth House, near by,
is built somewhat in the same style. The only relic of
the old church is the grand monument of his ancestor,
the first earl. In the churchyard is the tomb of
Evelyn Boscawen, Viscount Falmouth, who married
(the epitaph tells us) Baroness Le Despenser.
4

50 Cycle Rides round London

Here we are come into the Vale of Medway, and two
miles of a beautiful road bring us to Wateringbury,
where little rills, trickling down to join the greater
stream, nourish all these leafy hillsides into
such dense growth. There is a curious relic
in Wateringbury Church — an old wooden
club or mace three feet and a half in length,
known as the " Dumb Borsholder," belonging
to the hamlet of Pizein Well, in the Manor of
Chart. This was the central figure in the
court-leet of the manor, and on those occa-
sions was carried into the court by the head
tything-man, or borsholder, as a symbol of
authority, much in the same way as the Lord
Mayor of London takes the Mace with him
on state occasions. But the " Dumb Bors-
holder " seems to have been regarded both as
a symbol and as a person ; and, carried into
court with a handkerchief passed through a
ring at one end, had naturally to be answered
for when called upon to put in an appearance.
The other end of this club is provided with
an iron spike, like a bayonet, with which to
break open the doors of refractory tenants.
Retired from active service so long ago as
1748, this formidable weapon is now chained
up in the vestry.
DUMB BORs- From here to Teston the way is bordered

HOLDER. , , , „, TT . 1 . ,

by hop gardens. 1 eston Bridge, crossmg the
Medway in seven Gothic arches, is a beautiful old struc-
ture, but Teston Church, although its shingled spire on

Igiitham Mote and the Vale of Medway 5 1

the hillside looks picturesque, does not improve on closer
acquaintance, having been classically re-cast, something
in the manner of Mereworth.

Here we turn left, with a three-miles' run to St.
Leonard's Street and West Mailing, off to the right,
where the ruins of Mailing Abbey are to be seen.
Straight ahead is Offham, where one must look out for
the quintain on the green, a modern replica of the old

THE QUINTAIN, OKFHAM.

English village jousting instrument, consisting of an
upright post with a pivoted arm. One end of the arm
is thick, and from the other was suspended a bag of
flour, or some heavy object. The players in this old
sport tilted on horseback at the thickened end. If
their lance or staff struck it, and they were not nimble
enough, the other end, swinging round, would hit them
on the side of the head, unhorsing them. When the

52 Cycle Rides round London

hop-pickers are let loose upon the country, with every
recurrent autumn, the quintain is taken in until they
have gone home again.

A mile or so beyond this point our way crosses the
Sevenoaks to Maidstone road, and goes in very hilly
fashion to Wrotham, called 'I Rootam " by the natives.
Notice a stone built into the wall by an inn, recounting
how a Lieutenant-Colonel Shadwell was shot dead by
a deserter, over a hundred years ago. From Wrotham
it is a mile distant to Borough Green and Wrotham
Station, whence train to Sevenoaks and London.

THE DARENTH AND THE GRAYS

Within this circuit of just upon thirty miles much that
is characteristic of Kent, the " Garden of England," is to
be found ; much that is busily commercial, a goodly
proportion of beautiful, unfrequented country, old-
world villages on unspoiled stretches of river, and other
villages with many mills polluting the Darenth on its
way to the turbid Thames. Kent, in short, is a very
varied county, growing fruit and hops, and, by reason of
its waterways and its nearness to London, dotted over
with factories ; and this district here mapped out is a
very good exemplar of the whole. Erith, which may
be made the starting-point of this ride, is an interesting
place, overlooking the Thames, here half a mile wide
and crowded with all kinds of shipping ; a tarry, long-
shore, semi-nautical village — or town, should it be
called ? — with a crazy little wooden pier boasting a
picturesque summer-house kind of building at its end,
and with a puffing engine of a miniature kind noisily
playing at trains along it all day long, and performing
mysterious shunting operations in collusion with a few
lilliputian trucks. Engine and trucks to the contrary
and notwithstanding, Erith is very delightfully behind
the times, and is much more in accord with the days of
Nelson and Dibdin and the era of tar and hemp than

63

54

Cycle Rides round London

with our own period. Romantically decayed defences
against the inroads of the Thames bristle along the
foreshore, like so many black and broken teeth; over
across the estuary is the Essex shore, and here, at the
back, at Purfleet, are, actually, chalk cliffs, giving place
along the course of the river to marshes. " R.T.Y.C."
is the legend one reads on the jerseys of many

THE WATERSIDE, ERITH.

prosperous-looking sailormen lounging here, for Erith is
the headquarters of the Royal Thames Yachting Club.

The two miles between Erith and Crayford need
detain no one. Half the distance is an ascent, and the
rest goes steeply down to the valley of the Cray, where
Crayford, the first of the series of villages whose names
derive from that little stream, is situated. With all the
good-will in the world it is difficult, if not impossible,

The Darenth and the Grays 55

to say anything in favour of Crayford, which appears to
afford congenial harbourage to all the tramps who per-
vade that peculiarly tramp-infested highway, the Dover
road. " A townlet of slums " sums up the place. But

"*ni'

ON THE THAMES, NEAR ERITH.

note the long rhyming epitaph to Peter Isnell, parish
clerk, on the south side of the hilltop church —

"The life of this clerk was just threescore and ten,
Nearly half of which time he had sung out ' Amen ! '
In his youth he was married, like other young men,
But his wife died one day, so he chanted ' Amen ! ' "

and so forth.

The first turning out of the dusty high road to the
right, and then to the left, for Bexley (not Bexley
Heath, which is quite another and a very squalid place)
leads to a pleasant road following the river. From it,
on the left hand, within a mile, a glimpse is gained of
Hall Place, a beautiful old Tudor mansion built in
chequers of stone and flint. An excellent view of it
may be had by dismounting and looking through the
wrought-iron entrance gates. Then comes the long

56

Cycle Rides round London

street of Bexley and its curious spire, and a brick
bridge by which we cross the Cray, turning sharply to
the left, and soon afterwards as sharply to the right.
Very pretty is the river scenery just by Bexley Bridge;
millhouse and weir and tall clustered trees making a
rare picture. North Cray, the next village of The
Crays, as the group is locally known, is one mile ahead.

ERITH

VCRAYFO^D

DARTrORQ

/bexley

\

fHOKrn CRf\y

V suttok-at-howe;

fFOCfx'S CWY

\

/STPAUL'S CWS

/hortow KIR.BY

IsTMAKY CRAY

zr FAR^fl^(CHA^I

pORPIIiCTOti

Z' cmesFoj^D

GREEN iTRffTCIlEErJ 1

/

rSrtOI^£HA^\

OTFOR.D

Before entering it notice the long avenue on the left
leading to Mount Mascal, and then the lengthy, low
white house on the right at the beginning of the village.
This is the house where Lord Castlereagh committed
suicide in 1822. At the interval of another mile is
Foot's Cray, where the road from Farningham to
Sidcup, Eltham, and London crosses our route at right
angles. The village chiefly lies at the side, along the

The Darenth and the Grays

57

London road, and the unpretending old church at
the back.

A short interval of country road, and then the outlying
houses of St. Paul's Cray, which, with the adjoining
town of St. Mary Cray, forms one long street for the
length of over a mile and a half, or, including Orpington,
which practically joins on, of more than two miles and
a half. They make paper on a large scale at St. Paul's

PURFLEET, FROM THE DARENTH MEADOWS.

and St. Mary Cray, and the mills are very prominent
objects. Much too prominent at St. Mary Cray is a
hideous Congregational temple with a verdigris-coloured
dome, and just as prominent and as ugly is the railway
viaduct that straddles at a great height over the absurdly
narrow street.

Orpington was the scene of the publication of Ruskin's
works during a long series of years before they were
published in the usual way in London. It is a pretty

58

Cycle Rides round London

village, with an Early English church, a tree-shaded
wayside pond with miniature waterfalls, and a general
air of " something attempted, something done " to realise
Ruskinian ideals. A mile and a half beyond Orpington
we come down to the cross-roads leading, right to
Farnborough, and left to Sevenoaks. In front, on its
hillside, is a great red brick house. This is High Elms,
Sir John Lubbock's place. Turning to the left, we
reach the hamlet of Green Street Green, and then, in
another mile, Pratt's Bottom, There is a continual four

'.^•"Z"

miles and a quarter ascent from here to the crown of
Sepham Hill (or Polhill, as it is now generally called)
to give the wheelman pause, and to make him wish he
had come the other way round. From the Polhill Arms
at the summit the average touring cyclist will observe
that he has rather a nerve-shaking descent to make,
judging from the elevated position he has reached and
from the little world of landscape unfolded before him.
Caution and a good rim-brake, to keep control over the
machine, are, however, all that are necessary, even

The Darenth and the Grays 59

though the descent be winding. A tree-covered bank
on the right hand, flanking the hill with a certain
solemnity, would be more impressive still to the cyclist
did he know that this is the site of one of the great
circle of forts now building for the defence of London.
But the stranger is not cognisant of the fact, and so,
unhappily, misses a patriotic thrill in passing.

Continuing the wooded descent towards the Weald,
look out for a road on the left leading to Otford, a steep
and stony mile and a half. Here, intrepid adventurers
that we are, we have crossed the watershed and achieved
the valley of the Darenth. Otford was the site of one of
the sixteen palaces of the Archbishops of Canterbury.
It was built just before the Reformation, by Archbishop
Warham, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and resigned
by Cranmer to that very masterful monarch. The ruins
of it are still to be seen by the church.

Leaving Otford, turn to the left at the cross-roads,
and so, beside the railway, to Shoreham Station. The
village lies on a by-road to the left. They make paper
there also. It was the birthplace of that not sufficiently
appreciated African explorer, Commander Lovett-
Cameron, untimely dead. In the church are the flags
he carried with him on the Livingstone search expedition.
Like " Bobs " — who, according to Mr. Kipling, " don't
advertise" — Lovett- Cameron cared nothing for the
reclame that makes reputations with the many-headed ;
unlike him, he missed his proper meed of recognition.

The valley of the Darenth here is very beautiful, and
the river at Shoreham expands into the likeness of a
great lake. Here is a choice of routes : direct, beside

6o Cycle Rides round London

the railway, to Eynesford, or through Shoreham to
Eynesford by way of Shoreham Castle and LuUingstone.
There is little to choose either way, because the " castle "
at Shoreham exists no longer, and LuUingstone Park is
forbidden to cyclists. Let us reserve our enthusiasm
for Eynesford, an old English village of truly
Elizabethan spaciousness, set down in its valley beside

c;<j«AH^^^

EYNESFORD.

the Darenth, with an ancient, eminently sketchable and
paintable old bridge spanning the ford that originally
conferred the termination of the place-name; with a
highly interesting Norman and Early English church,
with lofty spire dominating the scene ; and with a
ruined castle tucked away in a builder's yard. Little
stress need be laid upon Eynesford Castle, because it is
now, in short, only a little piece of rubble wall, and
therefore to be taken very largely on trust. But the

The Darenth and the Grays 6i

village — to recur to it — is a very beautiful and
aesthetically satisfying fact.

Farningham, to which we come after Eynesford, is
only moderately interesting. Also, for the benefit of
those who may follow in these tracks, it may be noted
that it is in a hop-growing district, and when the hop-
pickers are let loose upon it the society is not of the
choicest. The village lies on the left-hand road ; we
pursue our way to Horton Kirby, where are more mills
and crooked streets, and thence to South Darenth, where
there are many factories and curving roads. Turn
acutely (and warily) to the left, and, crossing the river,
make for Sutton-at-Hone. Darenth lies off to the right.
The church is Norman and Early English, and the walls
have a plentiful admixture of Roman tiles. See the
church, by all means, but do not take that way to
Dartford. Return to the point where the road was left,
and go by way of the hamlet of Hawley.

Dartford is a town of flour-mills, paper-mills, powder-
mills, and factories where they make chemicals and
compound drugs. They do not smoke, these great
commercial structures, for the most part, but are cleanly,
white-painted, boarded structures that find their motive
power in the waters of the Darenth. Here is the
traditional home of paper-making in England, for it
was at Dartford, in the reign of Elizabeth, that John
Spielman, a settler on these shores from Lindau, in
Germany, introduced the process. Not only that, but
he was granted the sole licence for a period often years
of collecting rags for the making of his paper withal. If
you step into the quaint old church of Dartford, you

62

Cycle Rides round London

will see, so soon as your eyes become accustomed to the
gloom of that crepuscular interior, his tomb with the
efifigies of himself and his wife, together with shields of
arms bearing the fool's cap, said to have been his crest,
and certainly the original watermark of the particular
size of paper which from that circumstance has acquired
the name. There are many things
for the stranger to see at Dartford ;
among them the Bull Inn, one of
the very few remaining of the old
galleried coaching inns, with its
sign, the great black effigy of a
bull, aloft among the chimney-
stalks, a most whimsical position.
It was on Dartford Green, opposite
this old house, that Wat Tyler
dashed out the brains of the tax-
gatherer who had insulted his
daughter. There is no Green now
— only a narrow, dingy street ; and
there are those who would have
you believe that Wat Tyler is a
myth ; that there never was such a man, and that con-
sequently there was no daughter, and no tax-collector
whose brains were so summarily scattered. But let us
keep our illusions, O scientific historians !

From Dartford to Cray ford Station is two miles. Let
those who will, cycle the dusty high road to complete
the circle; but Dartford Station will serve as well, or
better, for returning to town.

THE fool's cap crest
OF SIR JOHN SPIELMAN,

CROYDON TO KNOCKHOLT BEECHES
AND THE KENTISH COMMONS

Croydon, where this trip is begun, is fortunate among
towns, for it is set amidst, or within reach of, great
stretches of wild and open common lands, for the most
part beautifully wooded and entirely free for the rambler
to come and go as he will. Besides these far-spreading
open spaces, which, extensive as they are even now, are
but the remains of the commons enclosed by the
iniquitous Enclosure Act of 1797, good, if hilly, roads
lead in almost every direction to quaint and interesting
places. Croydon itself, prosperous, handsomely rebuilt
of late years, and largely residential, is an example of
sudden growth ; for its population of less than 6000
persons in 1801 is now reaching nearly to 130,000;
These facts, which speak of crowds, and the additional
feature of tram-lines running from end to end of the
main street, are perhaps not altogether admirable from
the point of view of the passing cyclist ; but for those
who have eyes to see and ears to hear withal, the story
of modern Croydon, its enlightened and up-to-date
Corporation, and the sight of its palatial Town Hall, the
altogether adequate centre of a vigorous municipal life,
speak of romance. It is largely owing to this Corpora-
tion, composed chiefly of residents and professional men,

64 Cycle Rides round London

instead of the gang of local tradesmen who usually
bedevil the councils of a town, that the surroundings of
Croydon are so pleasant and well kept.

From East Croydon Station in the centre of the
town, a ride or walk to South Croydon and the turning
to the left where a sign-post marks the way to Sanderstead
and Warlingham, among a number of other places, will
show the inquiring stranger what manner of town this
is, and will astonish those who, having known the shabby

CaOVDOK

, Hayes

1 Keston

^ SrtNDERSTE'^P

I DowK£

\ CUDHAM

\^Vln^l.l^fCHfl^l

\ KKOCKHOLT

yfoVSUHCHw/

Tatsfield.

Croydon of the past, have not been here of late years.
Such an one, however well acquainted with the place of
old, must needs ask his way through Croydon's streets
to-day, so changed are they, and so utterly vanished the
most of the old landmarks. When Mr. Jabez Balfour
comes out of prison, he, the one-time Mayor, will need
a guide.

Once past the turning, and Sanderstead reached, along
a gently rising gradient, we are in comparatively rustic
surroundings. Near the road is the typically countryside
church, with blunted shingled spire and sombre yews.

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 65

In the churchyard lies Sir Francis Head, who died in
1875, whose book, Bubbles from the Brunnen, created
a vogue for the German spas and ruined the older
Continental resorts. Gradually ascending, the road
goes straight ahead to Warlingham, a somewhat bleak
and shivery-looking small village, ranged round a more
or less ragged and threadbare green at the intersection
of several roads. Here we are on a high tableland. The
small church, chiefly of Early English date, is seen
standing lonely in a flat field, to the left. A modern
stained-glass window records the fact that the Book of
Common Prayer was first used here in the short reign
of Edward the Sixth.

A welcome down gradient now leads along a good
road for a mile, and then we turn to the right for
Woldingham, to come immediately to a steep descent,
followed by an equally steep rise. After a mile and a
half of these experiences Woldingham is reached, and
with it a high plateau whence there are magnificent
views down to the dense woods of Mardon Park and
the Caterham valley,

Woldingham has a big and impressive name, a name
perhaps descriptive of its geographical position — "the
home on the wolds" — but it is a very small and
particularly mean and scrubby hamlet. A number of
stalwarts live here who do not mind the weary,
continuously steep ascent from the station, a mile and
a half away. The air is of the freshest and strongest,
and healthful in the extreme ; but when winter comes

and it blows great guns ! When the stormy winds

do blow this is, in short, no place for those likely to be
5

66 Cycle Rides round London

nervously apprehensive of their roofs. For this is at
the summit of the North Downs, whose steep southern
scarp is reached a mile away, along the road marked
by a sign-post to Titsey. This is a flat stretch, passing
near the modernised tiny church, one of the many
claiming to be the "smallest" churches in England. In
the little churchyard is the tomb of a suicide, with what
seems to be the very uncharitable quotation — "Charity
covereth a multitude of sins." The rugged lane beside

THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOLDINGHAM.

the church is a part of the old Pilgrims' road from
Winchester to Canterbury, and the building itself is
the mean and unworthy successor of a Pilgrims'
Chapel.

The first turning to the left, past this church, along
the road we have been following, almost immediately
opens up a wide-spreading view down to the level
Weald, lying outstretched with very much the look of
a great .map. Here, on this plateau overlooking half a
county, the Woldingham settlers aforesaid have built
their villas, and are with infinite pains and touching

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 67

pathos trying to induce gardens to grow amid the
flints and the thirsty chalk soil. No one can doubt that
they will, with constant care and great expenditure, be
delightful gardens — a hundred years hence.

There "is an uninterrupted view beyond the last of these
villas, at Botley Hill, where we are at a height of 868
feet above sea-level. Down below, the railway is seen,
like a toy line, and the villages of Oxted and Limpsfield
on either side of it, with yellow and green chequers of
fields and white ribbons of winding roads gradually
losing themselves in the indeterminate distance, where
earth meets sky in a vague haze. Here, looking right
and left, one sees at its best the characteristic sheer drop
of the chalky North Downs into the levels of the
Weald, and notices the care with which the villages are
ranged under the shelter of these mighty shoulders.

The road between this point and Tatsfield is excellent,
following the crest of the hills, and giving a good switch-
back course.

In less than a mile from this view-point we reach a
junction of roads : one on the left to Croydon ; our own,
ahead to Tatsfield ; the road to Limpsfield, down
beautiful, but steep and doubly danger-boarded, Titsey
Hill ; and a lane leading by a back-way to Limpsfield.
Titsey Hill's woods and coppices, open to the road,
make a fairy-like halting-place. Tatsfield Church, a mile
onwards, beside the road, is a supremely uninteresting
building commanding the finest prospects. The villagov
not worth seeing, lies half a mile off the road, to the left,
along breakneck lanes of the most homicidal character.

Passing Tatsfield Church, a down gradient leads to

68 Cycle Rides round London

several branching roads. The one that goes ahead to
the right is our route, and is the Pilgrims' road. .At
this point we descend into a pebbly and curving hollow,
and climbing up out of it cross the Surrey border and
enter Kent. At the next junction of roads to
Westerham, Bromley, and Knockholt Beeches keep
straight on along the Pilgrims' road beneath the
shoulders of the hills, until brought up against a " No
Thoroughfare " gate into Chevening Park.

The rustics here are of the most dunderheaded kind.
If you inquire the way to Chevening they don't know it,
whether you try it with a long " Che " or a short ; or else
gaze, tongue-tied, at you. The proper way, however, is
to turn to the right, and, on reaching another barred
road marked " No Thoroughfare," at the end of a half-
mile's run, to turn left along a flat, splendidly surfaced
road for another half-mile. Turning then to the left,
the grey church tower of Chevening is seen in front.

There is no village, only a few cottages outside the
park wall. House and park are the property of Earl
Stanhope. Should the tourist wish to explore the
course of the Pilgrims' road, running across the park,
he must ask permission as a favour, for in 1780 one of
my lord's ancestors was allowed to stop up the right of
way that had existed from time immemorial, and it
has been closed ever since by virtue of that special Act
of Parliament.

The house is a stately but gloomy building designed
originally by the inevitable Inigo Jones, but altered and
added to at different periods. Among the notable
collections here is the manuscript of the Earl of

Croydon to Knockholt Beechp:s 69

Chesterfield's famous (or rather infamous) letters to his
son, formulating a course of conduct aptly said to be a
vade mecum to perdition. There is one very notable
object in the church — a building, to judge from their
monuments, expressly devoted to perpetuating the
fame and name of the Stanhopes. This is the remark-
ably beautiful white marble recumbent group represent-
ing Lady Frederica Louisa Stanhope and her child ; the
work of Chantrey, and perhaps his best. It is a
touching and very human monument, and a fitting
pendant to that other fine work by Chantrey, the
" Sleeping Children," in Lichfield Cathedral.

Lady Frederica Stanhope's many virtues are hinted
at in no uncertain manner on the other side of the
monument, in the epitaph to the lady's husband,
" Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable James Hamilton
Stanhope," which says, " His afflicted relatives would
have found a melancholy satisfaction in commemorat-
ing the many talents and virtues which adorned him,
but in laying him by the side of his beloved wife, with
no other record than that he was not unworthy to be her
husband, they obey his last injunctions." Could praise
be of a more negative kind or uxorious post-mortem
compliment farther go?

Returning to the road, which runs eastward for half a
mile, and then climbs from these levels up the steep, un-
rideable Star Hill to the summit of the Downs, we reach
Knockholt, obtaining views on the way including the
hollow on the extreme right hand, whence the clouds of
blue smoke, rising like a column, indicate Dartford and
its chemical works, with Shooter's Hill in front, and the

70 Cycle Rides round London

heights of Penge to the left. Passing the hamlet of
Knockholt Pound, obtaining its name from an old
pound for strayed horses, cattle, and sheep that formerly
stood here, we enter Knockholt village, passing a
hideous, unfinished freak - building of gigantic size,
looking like some prison or barrack, with the addition of
a chimney-shaft resembling an observatory. This piling
up of stones and mortar on a colossal scale, and in the
most disapproved manner — the very negation of style,
with sheer walls and plain, rectangular windows —
appears to be the amusement of a wealthy gentleman,
who is alike his own builder and architect. " Vavasour's
Folly" is the uncomplimentary name by which it is
locally known.

Knockholt Beeches, a favourite Saturday afternoon
and Sunday holiday- ground for bean-feasters and the
like, are most conveniently reached by a lane at the side
of the " Crown Inn " ; but the machine will have to be
lifted over a couple of stiles, unless you like to leave it
outside the inn for the bean-feaster to play monkey-
tricks with it. For themselves alone the beeches are
distinctly not worth seeing, being just a grove of not
particularly old nor especially fine trees. The attraction
is the view from them towards London ; and, standing
as the trees do on very high ground, the view is
sufficiently remarkable. The Tower Bridge, it may be
added as an inducement to visit the spot, can be
distinctly seen from here — although the cynical might
say that it can be seen better and with less trouble
on Tower Hill — and that tiresome, eternally insistent
Crystal Palace, from which it seems almost impossible

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches 71

to get away in cycle runs round the south of London,
is seen scintillating in the sun as clearly as though
it were quite close at hand, instead of being eleven
miles distant. A feature of Knockholt Beeches is the
Cockney abandonment of the merrymakers here, when
'Enery and 'Enrietta exchange hats and dance to the
inspiring strains of the concertina. There are artists
who paint the Beeches and the view thence, and to them
these corybantic revels are sad stumbling-blocks ; which

KNOCKHOLT BEFXHES.

only serves to prove (what we already know) that the
days of classic landscape are dead, with Salvator Rosa,
Claude, and Turner. Any one of that artistic trio
would have seized the grand opportunity, and have
composed a picture of Knockholt Beeches in which
'Enrietta would become a sylph and 'Enery a wood-faun.
We have now just the return journey to indicate.
Taking the second turning to the right on leaving
Knockholt, a road is reached which affords a safe coast
to Cudham. Just at the little church of that place,

72 Cycle Rides round London

however, a sign-post and a danger-board give us pause,
and dismounting, we discover that our road to Downe
Hes along a sudden, short, and sharp drop, well meriting
that warning. A little way on, we can safely mount
again for another grand coast, carrying us half-way up
the next hill, and then a walk up the remainder brings
us through plantations to the hill-crest, whence we drop
comfortably into Darwin's picturesque village. This is
the evolutionist's place of pilgrimage, and Downe
House, for forty years the residence of that great man of
science, a much-observed retreat. Truth compels the
admission that it is an extremely ugly house. Darwin
died in 1882, a victim to scientific enthusiasm, having
caught a cold on the damp grass of his lawn one night,
on going out with a dark lantern to study the domestic
arrangements of the earthworms.

From Downe pretty lanes lead to Keston, passing
Holwood Park, a lovely estate now belonging to the
Earl of Derby, but noted as having been the scene of
William Wilberforce's determination to devote his life to
the abolition of slavery, so long ago as 1788. A stone
seat, a few hundred yards within the park, marks the
spot, and bears an explanatory inscription ; and a hoary
oak, its decrepit limbs chained and fastened elaborately
together, overhangs the scene.

In the pretty churchyard of Keston, situated in a
secluded hollow not far from this spot, and removed
by a long way from that bean-feaster's paradise, Keston
Common, lies Mrs. Craik, who, when Dinah Muloch,
wrote the once-popular John Halifax, Gentleman.

Proceeding, we come to Keston Common, where

Croydon to Knockholt Beeches

1Z

" Caesar's Well " and the charming ponds near it may
be sought, unhindered by the bean-feasters aforesaid,
who do not roam far from the pubHc-houses. Keston
is thought to have been a Roman station on the old
Watling Street, hence the name given, in allusive
fashion, to the pool — fre-
quently dry in summer —
called Csesar's Well.

Bordering the Common
is the " Fox Inn," where,
on the left hand, down in
the hollow, are the twin
settlements of " Paradise "
and " Purgatory " — the first
not particularly desirable,
and the second, perhaps,
the more preferable of the
two. Purgatory is at the
bottom of an extraordinarily
steep road, which, if not
indeed broad, certainly will
lead the unwary to destruc-
tion. The two places are
just groups of labourers'
cottages, and their names are their only remarkable
feature.

Glance at the ugly "George Inn" on passing through
Hayes. Its sign was painted, many years ago, by Sir
John Millais, with a picture of the half-mythical " George
and the Dragon " contest ; but it hung outside, exposed
to the weather, until it became faded, when a former

CililSAR's WELL.

74 Cycle Rides round London

landlord had it repainted, "as good as new," by a "local
artist " !

Through Hayes and Bromley there is a fine broad
road, eminently suited for a speedy ending of this
somewhat hilly run. Bromley Common, like the
adjoining Commons of Keston and Hayes, may be
overrun with the week-ender, but not even the raucous
van-loads, yelling the latest " comic " songs, can succeed
in vulgarising these healthy uplands. From Bromley
it is desirable to proceed home by train.

IN OLD-WORLD ESSEX

Few cyclists know how old-world the neglected county
of Essex really is. So unknown is this part of eastern
England that its ill-earned reputation for flatness and
want of interest has lasted since the first guide-book
writer made the initial mis-statement until the present
day. A great gulf separates the West-Ender and the
Central Londoner from Essex ; a gulf filled with
crowded streets and rendered dangerous to the cyclist
by the granite setts and tram-lines that characterise
the main roads leading from Whitechapel to Bow,
Stratford, Ilford, and Romford, beyond which last
town only can the country be said to commence.
Nor do railways afford so ready a means of inter-
course between east and west as could be desired.
For the sake, however, of seeing what kind of country
this may be, let us, greatly daring, get on to the Great
Eastern Railway at Liverpool Street, and take train
to Chadwell Heath, following the course indicated by
the sketch map. This gives a run of a little over
twenty miles, and shows Essex in its most characteristic
vein.

Gaining the main road to Romford from Chadwell
Heath Station, we follow it for three-quarters of a mile,
turning off to the left where a sign-post points the way

7i

76

Cycle Rides round London

to Havering-atte-Bower, along a good-surfaced, sandy
lane. Here we come immediately to pretty, pastoral
country, with spreading views in every direction across
the many-patterned fields. Away, four miles to the
left, on its striking hillside, is Claybury, the towers
of its asylum rubricated in the warm glow of the
afternoon sun until they take on a glory like that of

THE STOCKS, HAVERING-ATTK-BOWKK.

a New Jerusalem. Along the road one comes to an
old red brick barn, and then to the first of the many
old Essex wooden windmills. A gentle rise leads up
to the small hamlet of Collier Row, and thence the
road goes uphill all the way to Havering, turning to
the left at a point duly sign-posted. This is the first
taste of the Essex hills. Notice, as you ascend, a

In Old-World Essex ']•]

red brick house in a park on the right hand. This
is the so-called Bovver House, the comparatively
modern successor of the palace built by Edward the
Confessor. Here, in the surrounding park, it was,
according to the tradition, that the saintly king,
disturbed in his orisons by the song of the nightingales,
prayed that they might never sing again at Havering ;
and so it is (quite incorrectly) said that, even now, the
nightingale is a stranger to the surrounding woods.
The legend, true or not, does not raise our opinion of
the Confessor. Does not the poet finely say, " He
prayeth best who loveth best all things, both great
and small "?

Although Havering has a long, long history as a
royal domain and as the dower - house of queens,
little or nothing is left to show the tourist its former
importance, A few mounds near the rebuilt and
uninteresting church alone bespeak the site of the
palace.

As you come up the hill to the tiny village and turn
to the left by an ancient elm, whose hollow trunk has
been bricked up to help preserve it, notice the old stocks
on the green, designed for the accommodation of two.
Down a gently sloping road, take the first turning to
the right after passing the entrance to Pyrgo Park, and
then the first to the right again and past a red brick
chapel. Two miles and a half along a pleasant, sandy
lane, and then the way divides left and right, beside a
pond. Across a broad common, away to the right, are
seen the houses of Navestock village ; but the church
lies half a mile onward, down the left-hand road. This

78

Cycle Rides round London

rYFlELD

CREEKSTEAD

. WlLLlMCi^LE SP/\it<
'VYILLINC^LE t>0£

Kelyeoon Hatch

is one of the most curious and one of the most prettily-
situated churches in Essex, standing on a hilltop and
surmounted by groups of graceful wych elms, with the
waters of a broad lake, belonging to an adjoining park,
seen beyond. Essex is a county entirely devoid of
building-stone, and this fact very largely influenced
the building of its ancient churches, erected as they

were in times when
to bring stone from
great distances was
practically impossible.
Flint, being found
locally, was often
made use of; but the
county having practi-
cally been one vast
forest, timber was the
readiest building ma-
terial, and so we find
wood entering largely
into the construc-
tion of many Essex
churches. That of
Navesto.ck is an instance, and here it is the tower
that is timbered. Massive oak beams form the
framing, and are as perfect now as they were when
originally erected, over four hundred years ago. The
white-painted, weather-boarded exterior is, of course,
more recent. The whole is surmounted by a slender
shingled spire, and the effect is remarkably like that
of a Norwegian church. Patched and altered by many

Hmlhinc -atte-Bowzp

CHABWtll. M£/^TM

In Old-World Essex

79

succeeding generations since its first Norman and
Early English days, the body of the building is of
many styles ; and it is plain to see, from the fragments
of Norman mouldings and the blocked - up Early
English lancets, how utterly without reverence were
the old men for the work of their forebears. In the
Decorated and Perpendicular periods they inserted
the lovely traceried windows whose mouldering

NAVESTOCK CHURCH.

mullions yet remain, and in order to do so they cut
away without the slightest compunction the "narrow
slits of the Norman window-openings that merely
rendered the darkness of the interior more apparent,
and did the same by the larger but still inadequate
Early English lights. Inadequate, that is to say, for
lighting the building ; and it was just for this practical
purpose that the men of later periods ruthlessly swept
the original work away. That their own work was in

8o Cycle Rides round London

the highest degree artistic is but an accident ; but this
should afford no excuse to the purists among restorers,
who have wrought the most widespread havoc in old
churches like this by " restoring " buildings to the one
uniform style in which they were originally built, and
tearing down the traces of all the intervening periods,
which, besides being worthy of preservation for their
artistry, are really an integral part of the history of
such old structures. It is to be hoped that the restorer
will not be allowed to wreak his will upon Navestock
Church.

Retracing our course from here, and going up the
road by which we came, the way to Kelvedon Hatch —
or Kelvedon Common, as it is sometimes called — lies
up a steep and stony, but happily short, rise, succeeded
by one of those prettily - wooded winding lanes so
characteristic of Essex, with sunlit peeps between the
trees of sloping fields, golden-yellow with waving corn.
Very much has been heard of late years of agricultural
, depression in Essex, and of the impossibility of growing
wheat at a profit anywhere in England ; but they either
achieve the impossible here, or else (a thing inconceiv-
able in a farmer) they grow wheat for the mere pleasure
of seeing it grow. As a matter of fact, there is probably
more wheat grown in Essex to-day than in any other
county of its size.

In one mile, take a turning to the right, then the
first to the left, and then the next two turnings to the
right again, bringing the explorer to the scattered
village of Kelvedon Hatch, a thoroughly Essex village,
with the weather - boarded cottages and projecting

In Old-World Essex 8i

red brick chimney-breasts you will find scarce any-
where else than in this county. Make straight through
the long, flat village street, and then to the left, where
a sign-post marks the way to Blackmore. In something
like half a mile down this turning, notice the old stocks
at " Stocks Corner," where a sign-post points right for
Doddinghurst. Do not turn here, but continue ahead
until a post is observed indicating the road to Blackmore
to be down a turning to the left. In about two miles

BLACKMORE CHURCH.

from here, when you have been wheeling along a
country lane until Blackmore appears to be unattain-
able, and you have almost given up all hopes of
finding it, the spire of the village church is glimpsed
across the meadows to the right, and a pretty and
easy run leads into the street of this exceedingly
beautiful and old-world place.

At Navestock we saw one of the Essex timbered
belfries, but at Blackmore we discover the finest
example in the county, three-staged, and a very

82 Cycle Rides round London

forest of timbering within. A fine old red brick
mansion facing the churchyard is known as " Jericho,"
and, although its appearance was greatly altered in the
time of Queen Anne, really dates back to the days of
Henry the Eighth, whose secret retreat it was. Here that
Sultan carried on an intrigue with LadyElizabeth Talbois,
who gave birth in 15 19 to a son, named Henry Fitzroy,
created by his royal father Duke of Richmond and
Somerset. Had that son lived, we should doubtless
have possessed one more great peerage, left-handedly
descended from Royalty, to keep company with those
of the Duke of St. Albans, the Duke of Grafton, the
Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Munster, and others.
But he died, in his seventeenth year, in 1536.

The Court was pretty accurately informed of the
King's whereabouts on those occasions when he secretly
visited Blackmore, and whispered that he had "gone
to Jericho," There is, indeed, little doubt of that well-
known phrase having originated in this manner. A
stream running through the village is still called the
Jordan.

Leaving Blackmore for the twin villages of Willingale
Spain and Willingale Doe, cross the road at Blackmore,
and, turning to the left, pursue a level course along a
country road until reaching a solitary fork, which, of
course, being solitary and puzzling, has no sign-post.

The right-hand fork looks the most likely, but it is
the left, as a matter of fact, that should be taken. This
leads past a hamlet where the sign-post vouchsafes a
whole gazetteer-full of information ; after which, in half
a mile, turn to the right (the left turning lands you in a

In Old-World Essex

83

farmyard, and into a duck-pond, very green and slimy).
Then a horribly loose, dusty, and stony stretch for a
mile, and, turning left, the two churches of VVillingale
Spain and Willingale Doe are seen, standing in one
churchyard. An absurd legend tells how they were
built by two sisters who could not agree as to the style
of a church they had proposed to build between them.
One losing patience and saying that she would build a

TWO CHURCHES IN ONE CHURCHYARD : THE SISTER CHURCHES
OF WILLINGALE SPAIN AND WILLINGALE DOE.

church of her own, the other is supposed to have
answered, "If you're willing, girl, do ! " History, how-
ever, disproves this ridiculous story and tells us that
Willingale Doe obtained its second name from the old
lords of the manor, the family of D'Ou.

There is a curious epitaph in Willingale Spain
churchyard to one Charles Davis, who was killed in
his thirty-eighth year " by a fall from the elm tree near

84 Cycle Rides round London

which he is buried," as the inscription says. He lies,
indeed, under the shadow of it.

But this is not the only thing worth note, for, just
within the little doorway that leads into the chancel of
Willingale Spain Church, may be noticed on the floor
a curious monumental brass to Isaac Kello, who died,
aged nine years, in 1614, "son to Mr. Bartholomew
Kello, Minister of Christ's Evangell " —

"This godly child knew his Originall
And though right young, did scorn base cells of earth,
His soule doth Flourish in Heaven's Glistering Hall
Because it is a divine plant by birth."

It is not very easy to discover precisely what Mr.
Bartholomew Kello, who presumably wrote this, meant
by it, but its general tone sounds pathetic enough.

From here a winding lane leads to Fyfield, whose
rector has earned some notice by holding cyclists'
parades and by entertaining passing wheelmen.
Thence to Chipping Ongar it is an excellent road.
From here it will be convenient to take train back to
London ; first, however, paying a visit to Greenstead
Church, a short distance beyond the town, to the right
of the road. It lies at the end of a long avenue, and is
remarkable for the walls of its nave being constructed
of the trunks of oak trees, set upright. The exterior
still exhibits the rude rounded surface of the original
trunks, worn and furrowed by time; while the adze-
marks by which the inner sides have been planed down
to something like a flat surface are still visible, although
the work dates back to Saxon times. When the church
was restored in 1848 the decayed lower portions of

In Old- World Essex 85

these trunks were cut ofif — five inches of those forming
the south wall, and one inch from those on the north
side — and the rest preserved by being placed on a brick
sill built to the ground level. At the same time the
logs were tongued together with strips of oak to prevent
dampness penetrating to the church.

The chancel is of late Perpendicular date, and is of
red brick ; but the body of the church remains an eloquent
survival of the ancient steading in a clearing of the green
woods that once spread densely over old-world Essex.

The church is dedicated to that most famous of all
East Anglian saints, St. Edmund the King and Martyr,
who was seized by the Danes in the year 871 at Hoxne,
and on his refusing to renounce Christianity, bound by
them to an oak, and shot to death with arrows. And
not only is it so dedicated, but it owes its very existence,
in a curious way, to him ; having been originally built
as a temporary shrine of logs for his body to lie in on
the journey, when it was transferred to London from
its gorgeous shrine at Bury St. Edmunds during the
troubled years immediately preceding the Conquest.
A fragment of stained glass, with a crowned head
pictured on it, is let into a little window in the weather-
boarded tower, and a portion of the ancient Hoxne oak
is preserved at the Rectory, where there is an old
painting representing him. It is a singular coincidence
that the oak — St. Edmund's Oak, as it was named — fell
at the very time in 1848 when the little church was
being restored. The absolute truth of the legend was
proved by an ancient arrowhead being discovered almost
in the heart of the famous tree.

AMONG THE ESSEX HILLS

The title given above to this particular tour is one
eminently calculated to astonish those who have derived
their ideas of Essex from guide-book writers. It has
long been the fashion to describe Essex as a flat and
monotonous county. Probably the compilers of those
miscalled " guides " have known Wanstead Flats and
Barking Level, and have ventured along the Thames
marshes ; but that anyone who has travelled Essex
through could still describe it as flat is simply incon-
ceivable. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex
well would deny its much more than undulating general
character.

This tour is frankly planned for the purpose of visit-
ing the most prominent among the hills of Essex, and
so, as some rough roads will be met at one spot, and as
some walking, both up and down hill, will be necessary,
the itinerary does not extend to more than thirty-four
miles. Let it not, however, be supposed that, as a whole,
this is a route of hill-climbing and bad roads. Starting
at Brentwood, we are upon the main highway from
London to Colchester, and on the crest of a steep hill
which cyclists coming from London must needs climb.
By training to the town we just escape it, and the
succeeding five miles along this old coaching highway

88

Among the Essex Hills 87

are chiefly on the down grade. Brentwood is well worth
exploring. Its fine broad High Street still retains the
decayed trunk of the old oak marking the spot where
the Protestant martyr, William Hunter, was burnt in
1555. The trunk is carefully bricked up to preserve it.
A monument also serves to keep the martyr's memory
green. The old galleried courtyard of that old-time
coaching inn, the " White Hart," should be seen ; it is
one of the very few examples now remaining of a
bygone style of hostelries whose days ended when
railways came in.

Brentwood, originally called " Burntwood," probably
takes its name from a portion of the once dense forest
of Essex, burnt at some indefinite period, on whose site
the town arose ; and, sure enough, along the whole
course of this tour — and, indeed, of many another one
could make in Essex — relics of this vanished forest are
encountered in almost every old church, built more or
less largely of ancient timbers. Here at Shenfield,
which we reach through a beautiful common, a mile
distant from Brentwood, a portion of the nave arcade
is of wood, and at Mountnessing, the next place on
our itinerary, the tower is framed in massive oak.
The name of Mountnessing presents difficulties to
local tongues, and so it is known round about these
parts as " Money's End." Ingatestone, succeeding to
Mountnessing, is a decayed coaching town, with a
name corrupted from " Ing-atte-Stone" — the Meadow
by the Milestone, as some would say. By "stone,"
however, it is more likely that the old Roman stone-
paved way is meant.

88

Cycle Rides round London

Turning off this high road here to the right, we make
for Stock, along a hilly lane. Stock, a scattered village
situated on high ground, commanding beautiful views
southward toward the valley of the Thames, is of little

INCATESTONE ^^"^t^

■■■^^

^ STOCK

/^OUNTMESSmC

/

y/sHENFIELP

j 0ILIERICAY

BRENTWOOD

I

\ BUR.STEflD

LfllNDOrt

: 6ufy

LAINDOM HILLS

RAINHAI^

WENNINCTOM

PUJirLEF.T

GR'VYS

WtST IHURf^OCK

CHADWELL

interest for itself; but here, again, we find a very
remarkable church, with ancient timbered and weather-
boarded tower, surmounted by a shingled spire, springing
from a roofed lower stage with cavernous eaves, the
whole dating back to the close of the fifteenth century,
and restored, apparently, over two hundred years ago.

Among the Essex Hills

89

according to the inscription, " R R. E H 1683," still sharp
and distinct, on the woodwork of the belfry. Like most
of these Essex wooden churches, this of Stock is of
curiously Scandinavian aspect, and own sisters to it may
be found in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Even the
elaborate tracery and the mullions of the windows in
this tower are in wood, and, moreover, in excellent
preservation.

From where Stock stands on its ridge, it is nearly

three miles to Billericay, very steeply downhill at first,
then level, and again downhill to Billericay Station.
Yet, after all these descents, one observes that the little
town is itself on an elevated tableland. The name of
this place is, by the way, a sad rock of offence and a
stumbling-block to the stranger, who generally attempts
to pronounce it " Bill-erry-cay," somewhat after the
fashion of its spelling. The local shibboleth is, however,
" Bill-ricky." The interior of the church is of the most

90 Cycle Rides round London

disapproved churchwarden order of architecture, and the
exterior, with humpbacked roof and whimsical, squatty
little red brick tower, — said to date back three hundred
years, but not looking half that age, — is in a curiously
debased Gothic ; while there can be no doubt about the
mean Late Victorian of the 1897 Jubilee clock, bracketed
out from the tower.

Billericay consists chiefly of a long street of non-
descript houses, some very tiny, none very large, and
few particularly new. A goodly proportion of the
loose stones of Essex is strewn over the roadway, some
of them large enough to make the ghost of Macadam
writhe with disgust at the degeneracy of the times from
those he knew.

It is downhill again from the little town to Great
Burstead, a mile and a half away, on the left hand.
This was the mother-parish of Billericay, but has now
shrunken to a cottage or two and a fine old church,
very much out of repair. After this come further
descents, and then, where a modern inn faces up the
road, nearly four miles from the little town of Billericay,
turn left, and then first to the right. A little distance
ahead appears the odd sight of a church standing
solitary on a hilltop. This is the church of Laindon,
and we are now coming to those Essex mountains in
miniature, the Laindon Hills.

Leaving the cycle beneath the wayside hedge, climb
the steep hillside, over hurdles and across grass fields,
and then you arrive at one of the most singular churches
in the country. Laindon Church is of Early English
and later periods, and has the probably unique feature

Among the Essex Hills 91

of a priest's house, or anchor-hold, built on to the tower
at the west end, and opening directly into the church.
The priest who dwelt here in olden times must have
had rather a cosy retreat, in spite of the fact that it is
exposed to every wind that blows ; for the two rooms,
forming a lower and an upper floor, look cheerful and
comfortable. Four lattice windows give views away
over many miles of beautiful scenery, and the structure

LAINDON CHURCH.

itself, built of red brick, plaster, and timber, is of the
greatest curiosity and interest. In this odd structure
lives either the parish clerk or the sexton, and the
casual visitor to the church is like to be startled by the
sight of a domestic interior at its west end, and to hear
such unusual sounds as the washing of plates and dishes
echoing through the building from the direction of the
old priest's habitation.

Regaining the road, a hundred yards or so bring us

92 Cycle Rides round London

to a way (too execrable to call a road) running right
and left. Turn to the right, and then the first to the
left, along a track leading to Laindon Station. Over
the railway, and then continuously uphill for a mile,
along the worst possible tracks ; and then the summit
of the Laindon Hills is reached. Passing the post-
office it will be noticed that the postal authorities are at
variance with most people over the orthography of the
place, for it is spelled in a most aggressively prominent
and permanent fashion, on an enamelled iron sign,
" Langdon." The London, Tilbury, and Southend
Railway adopts the more usual form.

The rail brings many East London excursionists here
for half-day outings, and, indeed, the views from the
hilltop are worth coming many miles to see, and well
worth walking uphill with a cycle. Given a clear day,
you have not only the estuary of the Thames from
Greenwich to the Nore spread out before you, with the
Kent and Essex marshes extending like a pictorial map
on either shore, but the eye ranges away out to sea and
across the intervening country to the broad silver band
of the Medway, running up from Sheerness to Rochester.
Other widespread views of sea and land and river are to
be found in England, but nowhere else anything to
exactly compare with this ; for here, enlivening the
scene, and conveying some idea of the commercial
activity of the Thames and the Port of London, are the
great steamers, the sailing vessels, and the lumbering
barges, going back and forth so numerously as to
convey the idea of fleets. You may read in many books
figures of the most painstaking kind, set forth in an

Among the Essex Hills 93

endeavour to give an idea of the commercial status of
the Thames, but they will not serve to convey anything
like the impression you receive from this eyrie. The
cycle, after all, is one of the greatest among educational
forces.

The road-surveyors who have this particular district
of Essex under their control do not appear to have been
educated in the gospel of good roads, for as you turn
to the right, past the " Crown Inn," and to the left after
passing the modern and ugly church of Laindon Hills, a
quite unrideable descent of over half a mile suddenly
presents itself. It would be possible to cycle this in
comfort and safety were it not for the condition of the
road, which bears in its thick and loose gravel a very
close approximation to Brighton beach. Having per-
force walked this, a sharp turn to the left brings one to
a very welcome, good, though hilly road, ascending
direct to Horndon-on-the-Hill, a place which has been
visible for the last two miles, situated in much the same
fashion as the more familiar Harrow - on - the - Hill.
Horndon looks impressive from afar, and you approach
it expectant ; but when you reach it the first thought is
that it is a place by no means worth seeing, being just
a dusty, gritty, draggle-tailed village that has been
making up its mind to be modern for the last half-
century, and so has provided itself with some very
unlovely shops and houses. The best thing in Horndon-
on-the-Hill, a cynic might say, is the view from it of
other places : of Laindon, of Vange, and Bowers Gifford,
along the high ridge of wooded country to the north-
east.

94 Cycle Rides round London

From here we descend gradually to the Thames-side
lowlands. Making for Chadwell, and turning to the
right on passing the church, a glance backwards will
reveal Horndon at its best : the tree-surrounded old
church, with the bright vermilion pantiles of the older
houses, and the whirling sails of flanking windmills
giving a singularly foreign and Dutch-like effect. Take
the next turning to the left, and in half a mile to the
left again, having previously withstood the specious
invitation of a left-hand turn through a gate which only
leads to a farm-track. Another mile, and you come to
a right and left highway, opposite the " Cock Inn."
Neither of these leads to Chadwell, but there is a lane
leading straight ahead, beside the inn ; a very retiring
lane, and quite difficult to see, if not previously warned
of its existence. This leads, for a level two miles, to
Chadwell Church. Turn to the right here, along the
road to Grays. The other road, straight on, drops
sharply to the marshes and to Tilbury Docks, and the
surrounding industrial settlements. Tilbury Docks are
very impressive, but when cycling you can obtain all
the impressions of them that you have any use for from
this Grays road, two miles away.

All the way from here to Rainham — some nine miles
— is a splendid object-lesson in Thames-side shipping
and industries. It is not sufficient to know the Thames
only in its fashionable and holiday aspects. To know
it as a whole you must also have made some sort of
acquaintance with what .sailor-men call " London River "
— that is to say, the Thames below bridge, where all
the business is done. This is not, of course, to say that

Among the Essex Hills 95

these succeeding nine miles are ideal from the cyclist's
point of view. The busy and growing town of Grays
with the Thurrocks on either side, scarcely to be dis-
tinguished from it by the stranger, is only picturesque
to those who can find a romance in the riverside work ;
but the road surface is not so bad. Notice on the right,
immediately after leaving Grays, the sham castellated
building in a park now in course of being destroyed by
the chalk quarries. This is called Belmont Castle.
The chalk-pits here, and along the road to Purfleet, are
nothing less than stupendous. Railways run between
them and the river, where the chalk is shipped, or
manufactured as cement on the spot. Purfleet, to which
we now come, is a somewhat pleasing old-world river-
side place, with a pretty, tree-shaded road running
beside the river, where it is pleasant to halt and watch
the world's commerce float by ; the passenger steamers,
the "ocean tramps," the fruiters, the wool-ships, the
unmistakable oil-tank steamers, and all the very varied
traffic coming from or going to distant parts.

Across the river is Erith, and immediately opposite
are the hospital ships, off Crayford Ness. One of these
— the Castalia — was originally a twin-ship built for
the Channel traffic, with the idea of abolishing sea-
sickness. Nearer at hand is the old wooden man-o'-
war Cornwall^ now a training ship, and beside the road,
just here, is a disused hillside chalk quarry turned into
a botanic garden.

Purfleet has a picturesqueness all its own, not utterly
destroyed by the gunpowder magazines nor by the huge
tanks — like gasometers — where oil is stored. So long

96

Cycle Rides round London

as the busy perspective of the waterside remains, with
the " toil, glitter, grime, and wealth " of the tide, the
place cannot fail of interest.

Beyond, through Wennington and Rainham, the
marshes spread out on the left, kept from being drowned
out by the Thames by the aid of those earthen river
walls said to have been originally made by the Romans.
Passing through the uninteresting town of Rainham we
turn off to the right at Rippleside for the old-world

village of Dagenham, set upon a hilly site overlooking
the miry flats. Down there, on the inland side, lies
Parslowes, the old seat of the Fanshawes, islanded in
midst of ploughed fields ; riverward trail the smoke-
wreaths against the burnished sunset, and as we blunder
along the winding lanes for Dagenham Station we meet
the agricultural labourer, clumsy and stupefied with long
hours of physical toil, slouching off to his evening fuddle
at the " Blue Pig."

ABINGER, LEITH HILL, AND DORKING

EWELL is a convenient starting-point for this trip for
South Londoners, and has the additional advantage of
being served by two railways. Only in the spring of
the year, when the Epsom races are on, and the Derby
brings riotous crowds down by road as well as rail, do
Ewell and Epsom wake out of their customary quiet.
For the rest of the year they are old-fashioned places,
even in these villa-building latter days. Ewell, as its
name in some sort implies, is a place of springs and
running waters, with crooked streets and with an
ancient ivy-mantled church tower, all that is left of the
old parish church, standing solemn beside the modern
building. Just inside the churchyard gate notice a
stone to one who lost his life by falling from a horse
at Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxon ; and, close by, a
monument with urn and a kneeling figure in relief on a
pedestal to James Lowe, born 1798, who " met his death
from an accident the 12th October 1866. He was the
inventor of the segments of the screw-propeller, in use
since 1838, and his life, though unobtrusive, was not
without great benefit to his country. He suffered many
troubles, but bore them lightly."

Epsom, " town " we should presumably call it, a mile
and a half down the road, hints little or nothing to the
7

98

Cycle Rides round London

passing cyclist of its horse-racing fame, save perhaps
for stray glimpses gained of the great Grand Stand
perched upon the windy Downs, more than a mile away
to the left ; and if little be told by external appearances
of this intimate relation with the foremost classic race
in England, still less would the stranger gather that

Epsom is a Place with a Past ; a past, as a fashionable
Spa, scarce inferior to Bath in the days of good Queen
Anne. Epsom wells and Epsom salts have had their
day and ceased to be.

Suburbia is extending its frontiers in this direction,
and breezy Ashtead, two miles farther on, down a
pleasant road, is now set within the marches of the

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 99

suburbs, where the opposing camps of market gardeners
and speculative builders are pitched cheek by jowl,
and bricks and plaster are banishing the broccoli
and the peas. At Leatherhead the incursions of
villadom are lost in the intricacies of the old-fashioned
little town and in the embowering foliage that owes its

EwtlT,

Epsom

ASHTtAD^

GRGATUoOKHAfI

ErFiNCHAl«\

AtitiGtK^

COLOft^l^BOUl^

density to that beautiful stream, the Mole. Leatherhead
is situated at the junction of many roads. It is what
military men would call a "strategical point," and,
touring on a cycle through the southern and south-
western districts outside London, you come to it,
whether you will it so or not, again and again. And,
just because it is a pleasant place, you do not regret
the necessity. The streets of Leatherhead are narrow.

loo Cycle Rides round London

and slope steeply towards the river Mole ; also, they
curve in somewhat puzzling fashion. Our way, however,
lies straight ahead, passing that queer old inn the
"Running Horse" on the right, where the landlady,
Elynor Rummyng, gave short measure in the reign of
Henry the Eighth, and was rolled in a barrel for her
pains. A very old painted sign, fixed on the front of
the house, and now glazed to protect it from the
weather, shows a portrait of this iniquitous person, who,
if the artist is to be credited, was a phenomenally ugly
specimen of humanity, with predatory beak-like nose,
covered with warts. Here we cross the Mole by a long
bridge, and presently, keeping straight ahead, ascend a
sharp rise, which leads on to the rather exposed upper
road to Great Bookham and Effingham, those places
being singularly provided with parallel roads less than
a quarter of a mile apart. A cross-road to the right,
when two miles out of Leatherhead, gives access to
Great Bookham village. The church, which is interest-
ing, appears to be generally locked up, except during
service. In the churchyard notice the very beautiful
modern churchyard cross to the memory of Guy
Cuthbert Dawnay, killed by a buffalo in Masailand.

Regaining the upper road, Effingham is reached in a
mile. The church will be noticed standing, with the
tiny village, off to the right. The place gave a title to
Lord William Howard, created by Queen Mary " Lord
Howard of Effingham," and it was the son of this
nobleman who, as Lord High Admiral, commanded the
little fleet that destroyed the Spanish Armada. Know-
ing this, the tourist approaches Effingham with due

Abinger, Leitii Hill, and Dorking ioi

reverence and great expectancy. Unhappily, there is
nothing whatever in village or church to connect them
with the Admiral or others of the Howards. The
church itself is utterly modernised.

At the roads that here run right and left stands a
large inn, the " Prince Blucher." Turn to the left, and
then, after proceeding for nearly a mile, take the second
to the right. We are here on very high ground, having
cycled for a long while almost imperceptibly uphill.
Away to the left the successive hills of the North
Downs are seen : Box Hill and the others towards
Reigate, with their wooded crests and the characteristic
chalky scars on their southern face, softened to a Corot-
like mellowness in the golden sunshine of an autumn
afternoon. At the turning to the right, at which we
have now arrived, the road goes suddenly down and
deteriorates alarmingly, being knobbly and narrow,
and partly overgrown with grass. This is Effingham
Hill, and unless you would acquire reasons for vividly
remembering the place in the way of being thrown off",
it is distinctly advisable to walk some way down. This
descent leads to a farm in a deep hollow. Through
the stony farmyard, and walking up an equally stony
rise on the other side, a straight flat road is reached,
running for half a mile. Then, where roads right and
left appear, turn to the right, and so downhill to where
a sign-post stands at the bottom. Turn at this point
to the left, along a secluded road through copses which
lead presently to the crest of a hill marked by the red
danger-board of the Cyclists' Touring Club. These are
the so-called White Downs, and this White Down Hill.

I02 Cycle Rides round London

There are, as every cyclist knows, degrees of danger
on hills so marked by the C.T.C. Some are so little
dangerous that this red warning - board is often dis-
regarded ; but this particular hill is a mile long, very
steep, rough, and strewn with flints and lumps of chalk,
and with a sharp curve when nearly at the bottom. It
is, therefore, superlatively dangerous, and no one should
on any account attempt to ride it. It is no hardship to
walk down this hill, for it is no less superlatively beautiful
than dangerous. It is a hollow road, or rather lane, with
rugged chalky sides, into which the trees have thrust
great gnarled and knotty roots, like the fangs of teeth,
with steep hillsides stretching away overhead. Great
beeches and lesser hazels and hollies make a perfect
tunnel of foliage, through whose framing the eye looks
down to the Weald, far below.

When this descent is accomplished, the road leads
over a railway bridge, whence, to the left, the most
beautiful views of the Downs, with the spire of the
church on Ranmore Common above and that of Dork-
ing Church below, are spread out. Notice a brick-
field on the right, and look for a green road, also on
the right, a few yards beyond. This leads to a piece
of common land, known as " Evershed's Rough," the
scene of the fatal accident to Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop
of Winchester, on 19th July 1873, when, riding horseback,
he was thrown by his horse stumbling. The place is
marked by a granite cross ten feet high, simply carved
with the initials " Si W." and a shepherd's crook, in
relief, with the date inscribed in smaller letters. The
rebuilt parish church of Dorking, whose lofty spire can

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 105

be seen from near this spot, is also a memorial to that
energetic prelate, whom men called in life " Soapy Sam."
Some day, doubtless, when our civilisation and its
records have alike perished, say a thousand years hence,
the antiquaries of a new era will be disputing as to
the origin and meaning of this lonely cross, with its
weatherworn initials and shepherd's crook.

Cross-roads presently appear down the road. Here
a sign-post points ahead for Abinger, with the added
information that the first turning to the left should be
taken. Turning accordingly, as bidden, a pretty lane
is reached, with a very beautiful old pond, fringed with
rushes, on the left. This is Abinger mill-pond, and the
rust-red roofs of the mill itself can be seen rising from
a hollow on the farther side ; an old, old building which
Nature has long since reclaimed as her own, with lichens
growing everywhere, and ferns and wild plants that only
the botanist can name luxuriating amid the dampness
of the disused mill-wheel.

It is a steep and tiring ascent along a sandy lane to
Abinger, where a little church on one side of the road,
the " Abinger Hatch Inn " on the other, and a few
cottages, comprise the village. Three miles straight
ahead is Leith Hill, the tallest in the south of England,
rising to a height of close upon a thousand feet. The
route lies past Abinger Common, with its well and
picturesque well-house in the Norman style, built and
dedicated to St. James by Mr. Evelyn of Wotton in
1893. The way to the summit of Leith Hill is through
pine-woods and along a road of such excellent surface
and so gradual a rise that this hilltop expedition is not

io6 Cycle Rides round London

at all fatiguing. It leads by degrees half round the
hill, and brings one to a point where the road is crossed
by a white gate, directly under the tower that crowns
the hilltop. To leave one's cycle here against a tree-
trunk, and to clamber up the chalky final ascent to where
the tower stands on its flat plateau, is the best plan.
Those who are not already high enough can ascend this
tower at the cost of a penny a-head, and some six
thousand persons annually avail themselves of the
privilege. It was originally built in 1766 by a Mr. Hill,
of Leith Hill Place, who, dying in 1772, was, according
to his injunctions, buried here, under the flooring, when
the interior of the tower was filled up with cement and
stone. The stone tablet recording that he " led the life
of a true Christian and rural philosopher " still remains,
and so does the legend (true or untrue) that he was of
opinion that the world would be reversed on the Day of
Judgment, and so directed that he should be buried
head downwards.

The tower, having become ruinous, was restored by
Mr. Evelyn, who added the staircase turret. By the
sight of it, crowning the summit, Leith Hill can be
identified many miles distant, and the view from this
hilltop is extraordinarily widespread. The whole of
the counties of Surrey and Sussex, as far as the South
Downs, is stretched out flat like a carpet, to where the
wall of the South Downs alone prevents the sea being
disclosed along the length of the Sussex coast. At one
point, indeed, it can be seen, and that directly in front,
where a notch in those distant hills discloses a something
that may be sky and may be water, you think. But as

Abinger, Leith Hill, and Dorking 109

you look, on a sunny afternoon, and continue looking,
the sunlight streams down momentarily and wakens a
million facets to life, all flashing like diamond-points
or flecks of fire. They are the ripples of the English
Channel, transfigured by this radiance, and the notch
through which you see them is Shoreham Gap.

There are nearer stretches of water that thus mirror
the sun's rays. Frensham Ponds, away in the west,
eighteen miles away as the crow flies, glitter like
burnished steel, and in sharp contrast with black and
sullen Hindhead, Down below, somewhere amidst the
woods that are set round about this hill of hills, is
another lake, and near it the clustered chimneys of a
great mansion. For the rest, the weald at the foot of
the tumbled masses of the North Downs is vague,
formless, inchoate. There are towns there, we know,
and villages, hamlets, roads, and railways ; but they
are all lost in immensity. Perhaps, if you take literature
in your pocket when cycling, the reading of Tennyson's
" Vastness " is appropriate here, for it echoes the sense
that comes to one on this hilltop of the littleness of
one's self. (Mem. : If you wish to retain a good conceit
of yourself, keep to the plains !)

Clambering down to the road again, and through the
gate already mentioned, a beautiful downhill road leads
to the hamlet of Coldharbour, nestling amid the foothills
and the Alpine valleys in miniature that surround Leith
Hill. All the way hence to Dorking are trees : planta-
tions of Scotch firs, larches, and other trees that give
an added mountainous character to the scenery. And
lonely withal, and steep. Redlands Wood is passed

no Cycle Rides round London

through, and a long, steep hill, danger-boarded. With
caution, however, and a reliable brake, there is no reason
why this should not be ridden. So, coming swiftly down
into the flatlands, we are in Dorking before we know
that town is so near.

Turning to the right and through the main street, we
are soon out in the open country again, and turning to
the left at Betchworth Park, and under the shadow of
Box Hill, and in view of the line of yews marking the
course of the Pilgrims' Way, reach the left-hand turning
for Burgh Heath and Ewell. Toilsome is the ascent of
Betchworth Hill, by which the summit of the North
Downs is gained, but beautiful the backward view when
this excelsior business is done. Downhill again, how-
ever, into Pebble Coombe, and up to Banstead Downs,
whence — oh, happiness ! you may coast, feet up, with or
without a following wind, nearly all the way down into
Ewell ; some four miles, that is to say, along the best of
roads, through open heaths that, whether they are called
Burgh Heath, Banstead Downs, Walton Heath, or
Epsom Downs, are only portions of one vast high-lying
plateau dipping towards the valley of the Thames.
Sign-posts are not wanting on these heights — a fortunate
circumstance, because the wayfarers are not many.

RIPLEY AND THE SURREY COMMONS

The Londoner of the southern and western suburbs is
fortunate in the many breezy and picturesque stretches
of wild commons that form a more or less continual
girdle around those districts, at a distance of from fifteen
to twenty miles from town. The Surrey Commons,
more than those of Kent, are secluded and free from
the bean-feast parties that render Keston and Hayes
Commons somewhat less desirable than they would
otherwise be. It is true that in the neighbourhood of
Esher and Oxshott those who have the conduct of the
extensive Crown lands that border the commons are
beginning to exploit their healthy sites for villa-building ;
but although this red rash of " desirable residences "
among the dark green of the pine-woods is looked upon
with disfavour by the rambler in these hitherto unfre-
quented spots, what cannot be cured must be endured
with the best grace at command.

Esher Station is the key to this district for those who
hail from town, and sets you down on a common to
begin with. In fact, the London and South-Western
Railway runs along " common or commonable lands " —
as the Parliamentary Bills of the railway companies
express it — from Surbiton, and practically cuts Ditton

Common in half: more shame to the Parliamentary

111

112

Cycle Rides round London

Committees that ever permitted the deed. But then the
South- Western has, for some reason or another, always
been allowed to cut up and practically destroy the open
spaces along its route, so that there is scarce a common
in the south-western suburbs but that line has a cutting
through or an embankment across it, with level cross-
ings innumerable, at which those who use the roads

XtHerSfufion

1^ Prioy

Oxsfiotl

TxTCHAn

CREAT BOOKHAM
lITTLE BOOKHAA1

must needs wait the pleasure of the railway, until the
crowded traffic of passenger and goods trains has passed
by!

We gain the old Portsmouth road in a few hundred
yards from Esher Station, and, turning to the right,
climb the hill to the village, through Littleworth
Common. Reaching Esher, the way to Oxshott lies to
the left, past that old coaching inn the " Bear," and the
old and long-disused parish church that modestly hides
itself behind the inn.

The lodge gates of Claremont Park, beside the road,

Ripley and the Surrey Commons i 1 3

on the lovely common of Esher, are now passed, and
within this, perhaps the best- wooded park near London,
stands the great classic mansion begun by Lord Clive in
1768. Macaulay tells with dramatic effect how "the
peasantry of Surrey looked with mysterious horror on
the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and
whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the

CLAREMONT.

walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil,
who would one day carry him away bodily." Clive
made an end by committing suicide in his gloomy
mansion in Berkeley Square in 1774. Claremont is
now, of course. Crown property ; but the arms of Clive
still remain on the pediment of the mansion.

From here the road goes straight across Esher and
Arbrook Commons, with glimpses into the well-kept
8

1 14 Cycle Rides round London

park on the way, in sharp contrast with the wilderness
of bracken, just turning an " old gold " tint with the first
touch of autumn. A rugged, sandy hillock will be
noticed on the right hand, amidst the bracken and the
blackberry brambles. It is known as Round Hill, and,
although apparently and actually of no great height,
commands exquisite views. Safely leaving the cycle
down below in this unfrequented spot, it is distinctly
well worth while to scramble to the summit for the
views of the surrounding country. Telegraph Hill — the
wooded ridge between Oxshott and Leatherhead — is
prominent, and recalls the days before the advent of the
electric telegraph in 1838, when this height was one of
a series between the Admiralty in London and Ports-
mouth Dockyard, and fitted with semaphores for sig-
nalling. More prominent still, peering over the wood-
lands of Ruxley Lodge at Claygate, is the castellated
outlook tower built by Lord Foley ; while dense woods
and billowy expanses of gorse-clad commons complete
the picture, save on the clearest days, when, faintly to
be seen over the ridge of the North Downs, is Chancton-
bury Ring, the great hill near Worthing.

From here to Oxshott Station the way still lies
through commons. Around the station the builder is
busy on the Crown lands, and is creating a modern
village. Avoiding a knobbly road on the right, which a
sign-post informs us is the way to Stoke DAbernon, we
continue ahead, more by token that in doing so there
is a fine road and a good coast downhill. In another
mile a sign-post appears directing to Woodlands and
Stoke DAbernon. Here we will leave the Leatherhead

Ripley and the Surrey Commons 115

road, whose course we have been travelling, and turn to
the right, coming in less than a mile, still gently down-
hill, to another post. Instead of turning to the right
here we keep on for half a mile along the road, which
now begins to wind about and to take on the character
of a country lane. Then look out for a right-hand
turning at the corner of a park enclosed by a new red
brick wall. This is Randalls Park. Turning down
here a hundred yards or so, along a lane where the
local authorities delight to blast the scenery by tipping
all the potsherds and domestic refuse of the district,
the explorer, after enduring much, comes at last to a
pretty scene on the river Mole, which here runs in two
branches : the first spanned by a substantial bridge, the
second bridged by a very long and narrow structure
of wood intended for foot passengers only. Wheeled
traffic goes through a picturesque water-splash ; but the
cyclist must perforce dismount and walk his machine
over the wooden bridge. From this point, crossing a
road running right and left, the way lies ahead, up a
sharp rise through Fetcham village and along the road
to Great and Little Bookham. At the last-named place
we turn off to the right for the four miles' run to Ock-
ham, famous as being the Waterloo of the Bloomer
women ; for \\ was here, at the " Hautboy," that Mrs.
Sprague, the champion of convention, withstood the
breeched Lady Harberton, with complete success. Why
is there no monument to this historic event ?

The route to Ockham is almost wholly through
Effingham Common and Blackmore Heath, past solitary
Effingham Junction, and thence through woods to

ii6 Cycle Rides round London

Martyr's Green, where we turn to the left, and so to the
" Hautboy " and the village built under the shelter of
Ockham Park, the seat of the Earl of Lovelace. The
church, standing in the park, is worth seeing. Nailed
to the gallery front is the Chancellor of the Exchequer's
Purse worn by Lord Chancellor King, who held the
office in the reign of Queen Anne.

Among the eccentric epitaphs often quoted, that on
John Spong of Ockham should surely be numbered.
He died 17th November 1736, aged sixty years. The
lines on his tombstone were written by Daniel Wray,
F.R.S. Spong was a carpenter —

" Who many a sturdy Oak has laid along,
Fell'd by Death's surer hatchet, here lies Spong.
Posts oft he made, yet ne'er a Place could get,
And liv'd by Railing tho' he was no Wit.
Old Saws he had, altho' no Antiquarian,
And Stiles corrected, yet was no Grammariatt.
Long liv'd he Ockham^s Premier Architect,
And lasting as his fame, a tomb t'erect
In vain we seek an Artist such as He
Whose Pales and Gates are for Eternity.
So here he rests from all life's toils and follies:
Oh spare, kind Heaven ! his fellow-lab'rer Hollis."

Hollis was a bricklayer friend of Spong's, and appears,
at anyrate, to have been spared long enough to escape
being a post-mortem butt for Mr. Daniel Wray's wit.

From Ockham village, roads lead round either side
of Ockham Park into Ripley, a mile distant. It is worth
while to linger round Ripley for half a day, for the
village itself is pleasing and the surroundings are
exquisitely pretty. Ripley is a great deal more interest-
ing now to the cycling tourist than ever it was in the

Ripley and the Surrey Commons i 1 7

days of its cycling popularity. For there is no doubt
whatever that the days are gone, never to return, when
cycles were stacked by the hundred in the broad village
street on Saturdays and Sundays. Ripley has been
called the Mecca of every good cyclist, and for some
fifteen years its popularity was great among London
clubmen, to whom the twenty-three miles from town,
and the run home again across the commons that
border the Portsmouth road from London, formed a
delightful day's cycling. Indeed, so exclusively was
this a place of pilgrimage that the road to it was
generally known among cyclists as the " Ripley road,"
although, as a matter of fact, Ripley is but an incident
along the old coaching highway that stretches a long
course of seventy-three miles between London and
Portsmouth. So devoted was this class of cyclist to
Ripley that many never ventured beyond it, but made
that remarkably picturesque old inn, the " Anchor," and
the village green opposite, their lounging and gossiping
places, until it was time to start again for home. Ripley
was first " discovered " by cyclists in the dawn of the
'70's, when the very few who wheeled on what were
then called velocipedes found a welcome at the rustic
" Anchor " at a time when the riders of such new-fangled
contrivances were generally looked upon as pariahs, and
refused accommodation or even ordinary civility. Such
unwonted consideration made the fortunes of the
" Anchor," of the Dibbles who then occupied it, and
of the village of Ripley in general ; for it became known
that here, at least, was a place where the weary wheel-
man, who trundled his hundredweight or so of old iron

ii8 Cycle Rides round London

painfully along the roads, and called it " pleasure," could
take his peculiarly well-earned rest. Thus the fame of
Ripley grew, and with the growth of cycling clubs
attained really great proportions. Such early racing
cyclists as Cortis, the Honourable Ion Keith Falconer,
and "Jack" Keen were the first comers. They have
all passed into the Unknown, and so have "the
Dibbles," as the genial family who once occupied the
"Anchor" were collectively spoken of; and to-day
the tourist may see the memorial windows to Cortis
and the Dibble sisters in the ancient chapel of Ripley,
hard by the inn, windows erected by club - cyclists
who knew them well.

Now that the cycling club is an unnecessary and
rapidly decaying institution, Ripley is almost as deserted
as it was before its sudden popularity. Not quite, for
of course the roads are more frequented nowadays ; but
it has taken on again something of the old look it wore
when it was just the typical decayed coaching village.

Coming into the old-world street, with that truly
countrified scent — the scent of the wood-fuel burnt
largely instead of coal — the place is delightful. Away
on the north side of the road stretches the so-called
" green," in reality a broad and beautiful common, the
ideal spot for many a ramble by the winding Wey,
with its picturesque weirs and mills and background
of solemn firs. Such rambles to be taken preferably
without the cycle, to be left conveniently in the village.
Or a pretty cycle ride lies across the village street to
Newark Priory and Pyrford, two miles distant. It is an
unmistakable route, and, coming to the humpbacked

Ripley and the Surrey Commons 119

bridge across the Wey at Newark Mill, the grey ruins
of the Priory are prominent in a meadow on the right
hand. The place is quite solitary. No guide to chatter ;
most probably not even another cyclist. Nothing to
pay; only just to lift your machine over a field-gate,
and there you are. The fragment of a bridge or an

e^imfi^

NRWARK PRIORY,

entrance gate may be seen on approaching ; a fine piece
of work, with alternations of stone and knapped flints.
Beyond stand the ruins in romantic solitude, in that
low-lying watery situation the old monks loved so well.
Indeed, the Wey and its rush-fringed tributaries, that
wander so lazily through the level meads, form a very
maze. The monks' fish-ponds are all uncared for now,

I20 Cycle Rides round London

and their Priory roofless and stripped of almost every
fragment of worked stone ; but the tall lancet windows
remain to show the Early English character of the
building, and the sturdy flint walls may last many
centuries yet, if only one great ominous fissure, extend-
ing almost to the ground, is looked after. There is a
quite wonderfully effective view of the ruins from the
road to Pyrford, just where the Wey crosses it ; but for
a grand comprehensive view of the Priory, and the vale
in which it stands, one must climb the slight rise to
Pyrford itself.

Good roads lead thence to Byfleet Station, two miles
distant, for those who desire to return by train ; but the
more enjoyable course, should daylight last, is to return
to Ripley, and to cycle thence back to Esher through
Cobham Street, along that splendid highway, the old
Portsmouth road. Commons are almost continuous
along this route — Ockham Common, Wisley Common,
and that of Fairmile — and the scent of the surrounding
pine-woods is over them all.

RURAL MIDDLESEX

How rural and secluded still are some parts of
Middlesex let this run show. To roam far from the
madding crowd in this essentially " home county "
might seem impossible, but those who summon up the
not very great amount of energy required for following
the course of this tour will see many places sleepier and
more retired than in Devon or Cornwall. They will not
remain so very much longer ; which is an inducement to
see them without delay.

There are many ready ways of beginning this trip ;
from London to one of the Ealing stations by train —
Ealing on the District Railway for preference — or the
cyclist resident at Richmond, Kew, or Ealing can start
without depending upon outside aid. Starting, say,
from Kew, the way lies over the bridge, and thence
towards Gunnersbury along the wood-paved road. In
half a mile look out for what still, at the time of
writing, remains a countrified lane on the left —
" Gunnersbury lane," as it is called — where a sign-post
directs to Acton. Past market gardens we go, and
come, in little over half a mile, to a turning right and
left. Here a left-hand turn, and then the first to the
right, which is a long, straight road, planted with

121

122

Cycle Rides round London

Stanmo

iEdgware

young trees, leading direct on to Ealing Common, and
straight across it to Hanger Hill.

From here it is a steady rise of a mile up the country
road, with dairy farms here and there. Then a
somewhat steep descent, with one or two tricky curves
and loose patches of gravel where rains have made
channels across the road. With caution, therefore, the
descent should be made to the valley of the Brent,
the more particularly as the dairy farms aforesaid

are responsible for
many strayed cows
generally to be found
wandering in the road,
and as at the bottom,
where a rustic inn
'"^* "'^ stands, our route lies
I Wembley Qff tQ l-he left, along

a lane to which there
is a very acute turn-
ing, up a quite short
but sharp rise. It is necessary to have the machine
well in hand to negotiate this corner without dis-
mounting. A mile and a quarter of narrow, winding
lane, quite flat but with tall hedges on either side, like
a Devonshire lane, brings us to Perivale.

Now Perivale is one of the queerest little places it is
possible to set eyes upon. " Little " is said, and the
fullest sense of the adjective is to be understood ; for
besides the church — one of those claiming that curious
wrong -end -of- the -telescope kind of dignity as "the
smallest in England " — there is only one other building

Northolt

AJperton

Greenford

Rural Middlesex

123

at hand ; and that the rectory ! Indeed, in the entire
parish of 626 acres there are but five houses and
thirty-four inhabitants ; and this, let it be impressed
upon the reader, well within nine miles of London's
five millions of population. Perivale, save for this
church and those scattered farmsteads, is just a geo-
graphical expression, nothing more ; for there is no

THE LITTLE CHURCH OK PERIVALE.

village, no hamlet, no village shop, and no public-
house. All around are the low-lying water-meadows
bordering the river Brent.

There are those who refer to Perivale's ancient alias
of " Greenford Parva," and say its present name is but
a corruption of the " Parva " in its old style ; and
certainly Parva is a description descriptive enough.

124 Cycle Rides round London

even though its neighbour, Greenford Magna, be of
scarce sufficient size to warrant that adjective of
bigness.

Perivale Church is now well cared for, after a long
period of spiritual starvation ; a whimsical period when
the then rector was in the habit of offering a pot of
beer to the two or three rustics who alone used to
attend service. " It is scarcely worth while to read
service for so few," he would say ; " would you like
some beer at the rectory instead?" That formula
became so well known that the sole reason why even
these few appeared so regularly was the chance of
being bribed in this manner with a drink. A little
later, however, it became so much a matter of general
knowledge that thirsty and impecunious souls began in
summer time to make Perivale the goal of a pleasant
Sunday morning's walk from Ealing and the neigh-
bouring villages, and the thing grew scandalous. But
at this point the congregation had grown so large that
the rector, in defence of his cellar, had to resort to
his service again, greatly to the disgust of the thirsty
throng.

In winter no one came at all, because the Brent had
a habit (and has it still) of flooding roads and meadows
alike, and leaving church and rectory isolated. At
such times the old parish clerk (whose name was the
unusual one of Cain) would take up a commanding
position overlooking all approaches, and would call
out, " Can't see no one a-comin', sir ; may I put the
books up?"

It was this rector who had an incorrigible habit

Rural Middlesex 125

of transposing portions of words ; quite unconsciously,
of course, but with the most grotesquely laughable
results. Local gossip still keenly relishes the re-
collection of his announcing a hymn, " Kinkering congs
their titles take," and a little later, in his sermon,
saying, " My friends, we all of us have our little bits of
cuppiness." It was presumed from the context of his
discourse that he really meant " cups of bitterness."
The story goes that this habit became contagious,
and that a lady, finding a stranger in her pew, ex-
claimed, " Excuse me, but you're occupewing my
pie!"

In those days there was no church organ but only
a barrel instrument with twenty mechanical tunes,
not so tuneful as they might have been had some of
the cogs not been missing off the wheels. Being
missing, they gave rather a weird twist to the "Old
Hundredth" and the others that made up the reper-
toire.

The interior of the building was then greatly
neglected, and the lighting was accomplished by the
aid of candles stuck on pieces of tin nailed to the
ends of the pews. The church in those days possessed
no font, and when the question of providing one came
up at a vestry meeting, it was resolved that one be
not ordered, " because there are never any christen-
ings for the parishioners of Perivale, nor likely to be
any." In after years, on renovating the church, the
ancient font was discovered among some rubbish. It
is inscribed, "The gift of Simon Coston, gent., 1665."

The pretty little church is now well cared for.

126 Cycle Rides round London

Notice the very, very ancient and massive timbering
of the belfry, also weather-boarded outside, and look-
ing a very curiously un-ecclesiastical object across the
meadows. The rectory is also a timber-framed
structure of the fifteenth century.

Having thus recounted the short and simple annals of
little Perivale, we will take the first road to the left after
passing the church, and, crossing the Brent, turn to the
right. This is a remarkably pretty road, with the river
on one side, fringed with rushes and pollard willows.
Little humpbacked bridges carry the road over it, and
the wayside is marked with white posts, graduated up to
seven and nine feet, to mark the depth of the floods
prevalent here in winter. Now come the beginnings of
Greenford — properly called " Greenford Magna," to
distinguish it from " Parva " we have just left, down the
road, A sharp rise leads past a left-hand turning,
immediately followed by one on the right, where Green-
ford village will be found scattered sparsely along the
sides of a steep descent. At the foot of this, just before
coming to the rustic little weather-boarded church, there
is a lane on the left for Northolt, a mile and a quarter
distant. Northolt, despite its somewhat severely
sounding name (which, however, merely signifies " north
wood," just as Southall, originally " Southholt," stands
for a woodland once standing to the south), is one of the
prettiest and most delightful villages in Middlesex ; if it
is, indeed, large enough to be called a village at all.
Broad selvedges of common line the road where its
scattered cottages do not form a street, and the ex-
quisitely weathered and stained and patched little

Rural Middlesex

127

church stands away on a grassy bank, overlooking the
scene from amidst a cluster of windy elms. The church
is just in the picturesque condition the artist loves and
the restorer wants to sweep and garnish into newness.

A long road of three and a half miles runs straight
across from Northolt to Eastcote, Undulating all the
way. Reaching the cross-roads, turn right for Eastcote,
which is a hamlet of Ruislip, Here are ups and downs

<r<;««v>\.

along a tree-shaded hamlet of a few park-like residences
and pretty cottages, the road bordered by the lazy waters
of the Colne, lying listless, like a moat. Observe, on the
right, the queer, old-fashioned, timber-framed cottage
that serves the hamlet for a post-office.

Bear to the right at the fork in the road for Pinner,
entered by a cluster of cottages and " villas," built since
the opening of the Metropolitan Extension to Harrow
and Aylesbury a few years ago. Pinner is a large
village in process of being spoiled by its railway facilities.

128

Cycle Rides round London

A very broad street, lined with old-fashioned (and some
new-fashioned) houses, leads up to the imposing church,
which has a singular tall cross on the summit of its
tower. Note on the way the "Queen's Head Inn," its
sign a contemporary (and very bad) portrait of Queen
Anne, dated 1705.

An odd tomb, in the shape of a tower, is to be seen in
the churchyard. Now thickly overgrown with ivy, it is

A MYSTERIOUS MONUiMENT.

a picturesque object, but the peculiarity of it is that the
body of the person "buried" here — a certain William
London, in 1809 — is contained in a stone-encased coffin,
projecting from the tower, half-way up. The end of the
coffin bears an epitaph, which, however, affords no clue
to this freak. Legends, that may or may not be well
founded, tell that the descendants of William London, a
Scotch merchant, retain the property bequeathed by him
so long as he remains "above ground." This tower is

Rural Middlesex 129

supported on arches filled in with ornamental ironwork,
on which appear the mysterious words, " BYDE-MY-
TYME." The inquisitive stranger naturally wants to
know what he is waiting for, but the mystery is insoluble.

Leaving Pinner behind, turn left by the church, and
sOi by the second on the right, past Pinner, L. &
N.W.R., Station, and along a very good running road,
but otherwise featureless, to Stanmore. This is a good
run of four miles. At Stanmore, a beautiful but grow-
ing village, there is the old ivy-covered tower of the
demolished church standing romantically beside the new
building. Past this there are many puzzling roads ;
an unlikely looking narrow one leads to Whitchurch
and Edgware, but it is practically useless to try to
indicate it here. Ask one of the many people who are
always to be found at this corner. The route lies past
Canons Park. Whitchurch Church is an ugly, would-be
classic building. In the churchyard is the grave of the
so-called " Harmonious Blacksmith," from whose melo-
dious anvil Handel is (incorrectly) said to have obtained
the famous tune. It is decorated with a sculptured
headstone.

Within a short distance comes Edgware, and, turning
to the right, along the road to London, we spin along
up Redhill, and then, after doing a mile and a quarter
from Edgware, espy a turning on the right with a sign-
post directing to Mount Pleasant. This is a steep little
climb, leading to a charming country lane down which
to coast. Take the next turning to the left, leading to
Kingsbury Green, and then to the right, and, still bearing
to the right, find a lane on the left, leading past Chalk
9

130 Cycle Rides round London

Hill House and onward, circuitously leftwards to
Wembley, around the park, where the colossal unfinished
tower constitutes a distressing eyesore. At Wembley
turn right, as for Sudbury, and, immediately after passing
the station, to the left, coming down through canal-side
Alperton (which every inhabitant will persist in calling
" Appleton "), to the junction with our outward journey.

UNDER THE NORTH DOWNS

So wooded are these lofty hills, so rustic their every bend
and fold, and of so wondrous a fertility their bounteous
soil, that, were it not for the established fact of mere
distance from London lending the west country an
additional charm, one would dare to compare this
district with South Devon itself. Its actual merits are
equal ; its distance from town less than thirty miles, as
compared with two hundred. But beyond compare are
its old cottages, the red brick and timbered farmsteads,
and the ancient manor-houses of this corner of Surrey,
whose ruddy walls, or green and lichened roofs, exer-
cise the palettes and the pencils of artists innumerable.
Surrey farmhouses have their likeness nowhere else, and
in no other county shall you seek with equal certainty of
success these characteristics, or those clustered chimneys
that make every humble home of these valley roads and
sequestered bylanes an old-world mansion, dignified and
reposeful.

It could be very persuasively argued, if need were,
a propos of the title of this paper, that no one should
clirnb hills if he would keep a proper respect for them.
Let the valleys be easefully pedalled and exertion saved,
and the fine sense of mystery and the illimitable which
hilltops give, whether wreathed in mists or bathed in

181

132 Cycle Rides round London

sunlight, be at the same time preserved. When you
climb a hill you know its limits. You know, as a
result of your exploration, every minor feature of it, and
thus, fully informed, have of necessity something of that
contempt engendered by familiarity. Thus are the
easefully inclined excused of their easefulness. Not for
such the toilsome climb — to discover that the grass of
the hilltop is merely the grass of the valley, only of less
luxuriant growth. " All is vanity and vexation of spirit,"
said the Preacher. He had probably climbed the hill-
tops and become disillusioned. Thus it is to be an

CHILW0;\TM

explorer ! Why, even those stalwarts who have climbed
Parnassus have found the empyrean something too thin,
and the grass of those heights not so much rare as rank.
Happy, then, those who are content with the level lands,
and regard the uplands from that safe and comfortable
vantage-point. They keep their illusions, and if they
be imaginative there is no reason why lions and tigers,
eagles and other fearful wild-fowl, should not inhabit the
North Downs, instead of the rabbits and the song-birds
that reward the explorer's gaze.

The readiest way to reach this district is by train to
Redhill Junction ; not that anyone would resort to that
modern town — that bald and artless creation of railway

Under the North Downs 133

times — for any interest attaching to it, but its position
makes it the key to a lovely stretch of country.

It is a charmingly happy circumstance that the
southern face of the North Downs is followed for
many miles — indeed, along the whole extent of that
noble range, from Maidstone to Guildford and Farnham
— by splendid roads, reasonably level, good, and direct.
Those roads are traced in great measure in other
pages of this book ; let our route now lie from
Redhill to Guildford.

From the grim cluster of asylums, reformatories,

BUCKWND -REICHILL

JIORKlMG

YToTTOrt Hatch
ABI«C£R HAMMER,

and industrial schools at Redhill, one finds solace
presently at Reigate, where houses of from sixteenth
to late eighteenth century date abound. It is a town
typical of the coaching age, to which it owed its
eighteenth - century prosperity, and is built in char-
acteristic red brick. Thence to Reigate Heath, on
whose fine breezy expanse the curious may discover
that prime curiosity, the " Windmill Church." The
old windmill thus converted into a church nearly a
quarter of a century ago has a curious history. Now
a chapel-of-ease to Reigate, under the style of the
" Chapel of Holy Cross," the first service was con-
ducted on the 14th of September 1880, and has been

134

Cycle Rides round London

continued regularly on every Sunday since. The
reason for this singular conversion was purely senti-
mental, the mill standing on the site of one of four
ancient wayside oratories established for the use of
pilgrims in days when this, the Pilgrims' road from
Southampton to Winchester and Canterbury, was
largely travelled. One of the oratories became a
prison, another suffered a transformation into a house

jj««^

REIGATE HEATH.

attached to pleasure-grounds, and the Chapel of Holy
Cross became a windmill. The original building,
built for worship and used for milling, has long dis-
appeared, and the present one, built as a mill and
now used as a church, took its place. No attempt
has been made to alter the character of the interior,
whose oddly timbered circular space is simply fitted
with altar, rush-bottomed chairs, and cocoa-nut mat-
ting, the great beams painted and here and there

Under the North Downs 135

stencilled with ecclesiastical designs. A rental of one
shilling a year is paid for the use of the building to
Lady Henry Somerset.

All the way from Reigate Heath to Buckland the
North Downs are seen going in a procession to
the right, beneath them nowadays springing up the
country homes of a generation that loves scenery and
can scarce understand why our grandfathers did not
appreciate it. Thoroughly typical of the old time
was Captain Morris, author of those town-loving lines —

" In town let me live, then ; in town let me die ;
P'or no, I can't relish the country, not I.
If one must have a cottage in summer to dwell,
O give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall."

His aspiration was denied him, for that eighteenth-
century Anacreon died here at Brockham.

A solemn row of immemorial yews along the
shoulders of the hills marks where the sandalled feet
of pilgrims trod the Pilgrims' Way. At Buckland
a pond, a sign-post, a tall elm, and a church that
looks like a barn, and a barn that looks like a
church, make up a very pretty picture. Betchworth
lies to the left hand, a mile onward, and possesses
some stately old houses. To it succeeds Dorking.

Now Dorking, if you can conceive the conjunction,
is at once aristocratic and popular. The proximity
of that Cockney pleasance, Box Hill, is, of course,
responsible for the one, and doubtless the overawing
neighbourhood of Denbies and Deepdene accounts for
the other. Dorking is celebrated for a mythical battle,
for a breed of fowls, and for having been the home

136

Cycle Rides round London

of Tony Weller, who kept the " Markis o' Granby " here.
The name of the place was invariably spelt " Darking" a
hundred years ago, even by literary folks, and country
people still pronounce it in that way. It is a supremely
cheerful town, with a very wide High Street.

Beyond the town the North Downs assume a wilder
and more wooded aspect, where the modern but pretty

%i^.

WESTCOTT.

hamlet of Westcott stands by the way, and the deep
valley and heavy woodlands of Wotton open out
delightfully upon the wayfarer. In the "little church
of Wotton " — pronounced "Wootton " — lies John Evelyn,
the Diarist and lover of trees, with many other Evelyns,
and Wotton Park is just beyond, where many trees of

Under the North Downs

^2>7

his planting yet flourish. Wotton Hatch, a lonely-
hamlet, overlooks the scene.

THE LITTLE CHURCH OF WOTTON.

At Abinger Hammer and Gomshall, the trickling
streams that have followed the valley are dammed

138 Cycle Rides round London

up into " hammer ponds," where, " once upon a time,"
iron was forged. But it is nearly two hundred years
since the last furnace was blown out and the final
hammer rang upon the ultimate anvil at Abinger.
The days when iron-ore was dug and smelted in
Kent, Sussex, and Surrey are long forgot.

Shiere succeeds to Gomshall in half a mile. Shiere
and picturesqueness are synonymous and interchange-
able terms ; a place composed of a narrow street
with queer cottages all tumbled together, as though
for warmth, or as if land were scarce and dear.

Now, along a winding but excellent road, we come
to Albury ; the famous " Silent Pool " lying a little
way off to the right, on a fork of the road leading
to Newlands Corner. It was the egregious Martin
Tupper who made the " Silent Pool " famous, but,
truth to tell, it is but a pretty lakelet, whose real
name was Sherbourne Pond. Its remarkably clear
waters swarm with trout, whose extraordinary tame-
ness is perhaps due to the many visitors, who feed
them for the pleasure of seeing them spring out of
the water for their food.

Coming to Albury, we enter upon the loveliest section
of the whole journey. The long, scattered village,
with picturesque old houses and modern cottages,
built with rare good taste, leads to Albury Park, the
Surrey home of the Duke of Northumberland. The
partly ruined church in the park, with the modern
Irvingite transept and the curiously domed roof of
the central tower, is worth seeing and sketching, as
also is the romantically situated St. Martha's Chapel,

Under the North Downs

141

crowning one of the most conspicuous hills of the
North Downs.

" St. Martha's " Chapel may really have been " sancti
martyris " originally, and dedicated to the " holy blisful
martyr," St. Thomas of Canterbury. It was built in the
late twelfth century and was a chapel on the old Pilgrims'

M^ ^^

HOBP^wf* ^VSMK^^^^

"^^

1 ■ """---

AN OLD WEIR ON THE WEY,

Way. The corruption of the name into " St. Martha's "
can readily be understood.

On the way to Chilworth, Postford Ponds skirt the
roadside and form a pretty grouping of water, wood-
lands, and old farmhouses, with St. Martha's in the
distance. Chilworth, whose not very accessible parish
church St. Martha's Chapel is, lies on the little stream

142 Cycle Rides round London

that forms this chain of ponds. But hear what old
Cobbett says : " This valley, which seems to have
been created by a bountiful Providence as one of the
choicest retreats of man, which seems formed for a scene
of innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful
man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in
effecting two of the most damnable of purposes ; in
carrying into execution two of the most damnable
inventions that ever sprang from the mind of man under
the influence of the Devil ! namely, the making of
gunpowder and of banknotes." The banknotes are no
longer made at Chilworth, but the manufacture of
"villainous saltpetre" still proceeds.

To Chilworth succeeds the wide common of Shalford,
leading close by the winding Wey to Guildford town.
Here that little river, evidently not so little, ages ago,
has cut a deep cleft through the immense rampart of
the North Downs, so that the road to the town is quite
deeply recessed in a valley, and flat.

Do you know Guildford, and yet not love it — its
quaint High Street, the steepest, they say, in all
England, built along the slope of this cleft made by
the Wey; its churches. Abbot's Hospital, and that
quaintest and most curious of old buildings, the
Guildhall?

They do not build Guildhalls of this kind to-day, the
architects who are called in to design such things.
Perhaps they are not allowed. Nor are they called
Guildhalls. " Perish the name ! " say in effect the
upstart towns of this expansive era, and nothing will
serve their turn but " Municipal Buildings." We know

THE GUILDHALL AND HIGH STREET, GUILDFORD

Under the North Downs 145

the Municipal Building order of architecture, and,
sooth to say, we do not like it, whether it be named
Classic or Victorian Renaissance, or labelled in any
other style intended to cloak poverty of design and
display a crazy patchwork of priggish eclecticism.

Compared with the frowning Keep of Guildford, the
Guildhall is, of course, the merest parvenu, having been
built in 1683, two years before Monmouth was dragged
up to execution on Tower Hill after Sedgemoor fight.
But the old Norman tower is four-square and stern, with
only the picturesqueness that historic association can
find ; while the belfried turret of the Guildhall, and
its boldly projecting clock, impending massively over
the pavement of the High Street, are the pride of the
eye and a delight to the artistic sense of all them that
love their like.

Leaving Guildford's picturesque High Street by one of
the retiring thoroughfares branching from it on the
north side, past that most sketchable of Guildhalls, we
come, in something less than a mile, to a crossing of the
Wey, and so to a hillside parting of the roads. Here we
take the left-hand turning, to the secluded hamlet of
Wood Street, whence roads and lanes in plenty — some
straight, many devious — lead to that hamlet of
" Normandy" where, in 1835, William Cobbett died. If
it be true that William the First " loved the red deer
like a father," it may be said with at least equal
appropriateness that Cobbett had as great a love for
trees. Here, at oddly named Normandy, he oscillated
between the equally congenial occupations of harrying a
political opponent and of creating plantations, and many
10

146 Cycle Rides round London

of the saplings he planted with his own hands are now
grown up to form the woodlands that clothe this
countryside.

It was well for Cobbett's peace of mind that Aldershot
Camp, the signs of whose neighbourhood now begin to
be evident on our way to Ash and Farnham, had not
come into being while he still lived ; for, soldier though
he had been, and a characteristically independent and
sturdy one, he grew to hate the military, and never
missed an opportunity of venting his apocalyptic wrath
upon the Army. Did he live now, he would find plenty
opportunities here, and around his birthplace at
Farnham ; for the presence of the redcoats — and the
blue, the grey, the green, and the khaki coats too — is
very much in evidence, alike on the road and on the
surface of the road, cruelly cut up by ammunition
waggons and guns.

And so through crooked-streeted Ash, with its public-
houses dedicated to military commanders distinguished
and heroic, or merely Royal, and the stores and the
shops showing the unromantic and domestic side of the
soldier's life, which, and not glory, is nearly the whole
of Tommy Atkins's existence, varied with dusty and
inglorious drills in gritty barrack-yards and field-days in
the Sahara-like Long Valley.

The neighbourhood of Aldershot and its camp is
highly interesting to those who take an interest in
soldiering (and most feel an attraction that way), but it is
utterly destructive of the picturesque.

A mile beyond Ash we cross insensibly from Surrey
into Hampshire,' and in another mile back again, owing,

Under the North Downs 147

not to any vagary in the road, an eminently and
respectably straight highway, but to the serpentine and
elusive character of the county boundary. And thus —
through unsponsored new hamlets, the sporadic but un-
acknowledged offshoots of Aldershot, sprawling yonder
across the sandy wastes — to the tail of the Hog's Back,
whose bristles are the larches and firs of this heathy
country.

The right-hand way, at the junction of the roads,
leads into Farnham, " rather better," as the country
people say, than a mile off. It is conceivable that, at
the end of a long day, this might appear to be " rather
worse." Farnham remains itself still, despite its near
military neighbour, a quietly prosperous old town, with
a long east to west street, and a short and broad one in
the middle of the town, running north to the Castle, and
beyond it to a very welter of firs and sands. Farnham
Castle yet gives its tone to Farnham, for it is still — as it
has been for nearly eight hundred years — the residence
of the Bishops of Winchester ; although, to be sure, the
Bishops cut a very small figure nowadays beside that
soldier -statesman -churchman, Henry of Blois, who
originally built the fortress. Farnham is appropriately
sedate and decorous. The ruined Keep is here, in its
pretty garden shaded by ancient cedars, and there are
a few vestiges of antiquity within the great range of
buildings ; but very few, for the restorations by Bishop
Morlcy in the late seventeenth century, and those of
recent years, have preserved the place as a residence at
the expense of archaeology. Even so, the picture made
by the long and varied front looking down upon

148 Cycle Rides round London

Farnham and seeming to block the street, is very
grand.

Away on the other side of the main street is the
church ; the churchyard a place of pilgrimage for the
sake of Cobbett, that ardent reformer who frothed at
the mouth with political denunciations for forty years,
and now lies beneath a closely railed-in altar-tomb on
the north side. A more cheerful resort is his birthplace,
a very old gabled house, now the "Jolly Farmer Inn,"
facing a bridge across the Wey, in Abbey Street.

He was born in 1762 ; and almost alone, perhaps,
among the places with which he was familiar, the house
is unchanged.

It is past the railway station that one leaves Farnham
for Waverley Abbey. Signs of the hop-growing industry
of which this town is a centre are evident to sight and
smell in early days of autumn, for then are rumbling
carts laden with fat sacks (" pockets," they call them) of
fragrant hops met with at every turn, and the scent of
■ them produces the most furious appetite.

After passing the level crossing take the left-hand
road, which leads to Waverley in under two miles, with
Moor Park on the left, once the seat of Sir William
Temple, the patron of Swift, the " eccentric, uncouth,
disagreeable young Irishman" who was that retired
statesman's secretary. How little dignified was the
post above that of a lackey may be judged from the
flirtation Swift began in the servants' hall with Lady
Giffard's waiting - maid, a flirtation " which," says
Macaulay, " was to be as widely famed as the passion
of Petrarch or of Abelard." The waiting-maid was

Under the North Downs 149

" Stella," and the poor secretary became that terrible
genius, Dean Swift.

The park, rugged and impressive, with sombre
conifers, is traversed by the Wey. Under a sundial
before the house is buried the heart of Sir William
Temple, the former owner of the place, at his own
request, in a silver box ; and at the other end of this
domain is that celebrated cavern, " Mother Ludlam's
Hole," a cave containing a spring, now railed off from
vulgar profanation by an ornamental iron railing. It
was here that the brethren of Waverley Abbey, it is
thought, found the source of their drinking water.
" Mother Ludlam " was a chimerical personage of
the Robin Goodfellow type, who, according to the
superstitious peasantry, supplied suppliants with any
article they might require, on their repairing to her cave
at the stroke of midnight, turning round thrice, and
three times repeating the request ; promising to return
the borrowed article in two days. The next morning
the object wished for would be found outside the mouth
of the cavern. This beneficent personage at last lent a
cauldron to some ill-principled person or another who
forgot to return it, and since then the charm has ceased
to work. The proof of this story lies in the fact that
the cauldron is to be seen to this day, preserved in
the vestry of Frensham Church ; a fact, of course,
conclusive !

A pretty, rose-entwined cottage by the entrance to
Moor Park still goes by the name of " Stella's," and
opposite, on the right hand of the road, is the lodge
gate leading to the grounds of Waverley Abbey, whose

150 Cycle Rides round London

scanty ruins stand in a flat meadow beside the river
Wey, within sight of dark, pine-clad Crooksbury Hill.
The river describes three parts of a circle around these
crumbling walls, the poor relics of the first Cistercian
Abbey in England. There is, indeed, more left of the
Abbey underground than above, for the crypt remains
perfect.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this spot is
intangible, and lies in the fact that the title of the
Waverley novels derives from these ruined walls,
Scott having read those still-existing records of this
religious brotherhood, — the " Annales Waverlienses," —
and having been impressed with the musical sound of
the name.

Leaving the grounds of Waverley Abbey, the dark,
pine-clad mass of Crooksbury Hill lies ahead, and must
be climbed to reach Scale and the neighbouring villages
that lie down below its northern shoulder, and under
the lee of that ten miles' stretch of the North Downs,
from Guildford to Farnham, known as the Hog's Back.
Seale is a sheltered, secluded nook, shut in by pines.
Two miles distant from it, following under the ridge
towards Guildford, along an unfrequented road, comes
Puttenham, owing everything, in a picturesque sense, to
its solemn background of hills and woodlands. With-
out that scenic backing it would be nothing remark-
able.

From here we bend in a south-easterly direction,
away from the near companionship of the hills and
woods, towards Compton, a village remarkable for its
little Norman and Early English church, almost hidden

Under the North Downs

151

from the stranger's notice by the trees that densely
surround it and its unassuming shingled spire. Notice
the odd dormer windows in the roof, Hke those of a
dwelling-house. But the great peculiarity here is that
the chancel is in two storeys, a most remarkable and
unusual device. The exterior of the chancel is common-
place, not to say ugly, and was rebuilt in i860, when

PUTTENHAM.

traces of an outside staircase to the upper storey of
the chancel were destroyed ; but the interior remains
particularly beautiful and interesting. The chancel is
divided from the nave by a round-headed Norman arch,
ornamented with dog-tooth moulding, and immediately
over the altar rises another of exactly the same type,
but of only half its height. It is this, with its groined
ceiling, dividing the eastern end of the building into two

152 Cycle Rides round London

floors, which makes the chancel two-storeyed. This
upper chamber is conjectured to have served the double
purpose of rood-loft and chantry chapel ; but beyond
conjecture no one has ever been able to go, for the
history of the church is silent on this point.

From Compton to the entrance of Loseley Park is
a mile. The gates will be seen on the left, and admit
to a tree-shaded park, which might almost, from its
solitude and wildness, have been the original of the
legend of the Sleeping Beauty. Such is Loseley, and
such the grey stone Early Elizabethan house, standing
ghostlike at the end of the avenue. Loseley was begun
by Sir William More in 1515, and never completed after
the architect's full design. Still, it is a large and stately
mansion, and contains treasures of stained glass and
carvings, of armour and relics, that make it notable
indeed. The " Loseley MSS." preserved here, the
correspondence during nearly five hundred years of
England's most famous statesmen and history-makers,
is among the best of such collections.

A ramble through the park brings the traveller to a
road running right and left. The turning to the right
helps us toward the completion of our circle, and leads
past another old mansion, Braboeuf House, to the old
Portsmouth road, by St. Catherine's Hill. Here our
way lies downhill, to the left, into Guildford ; but,
before concluding, let us ascend the easy path to the
hilltop, and look down to where that elusive companion
of the greater part of this tour, the river Wey, runs far
below, past picturesque St. Catherine's Ferry. It is a
romantic spot, this hollow on the hillside, through

Under the North Downs 153

which runs the old highway to Portsmouth. Many
years ago some long-dissolved Highway Trust lowered
the road through the crest of the hill for the sake of the
horses, and " St. Catherine's Hollow," as it is known, has
since become the spot for a painter. Turner, indeed,
painted it, but he was more concerned to show the
ruined Chapel of St. Catherine beyond than to linger
over the exquisite wildness and ruggedness of these
overhanging banks. They are of the yellowest sand
and softest sandstone, and here and there they form
cliffs not so diminutive but that the sand martins have
dug their tunnelled homes in them, and have found
safety from attack. The face of these clifflets is as full
of these nest-holes as the white cliffs of Dover are of
batteries and casemates, and if you are content to wait
quietly and to watch patiently, the lively inhabitants of
them will be observed coming and going. Other tunnels
there are here, bigger and less tidy. These are the
burrows of the rabbits. There is a greater tunnel still
down below — that of the South -Western Railway,
between Guildford and Godalming, which collapsed
suddenly one midnight in 1895, burying horses and
carriages from the stables of a villa on this hilltop.
Animals and carriages alike fell through into the depths
beneath and were destroyed. The line was blocked for
a week, and during that period this road was strangely
peopled with omnibuses imported from London to
convey passengers between Guildford Station and the
temporary station of " St. Catherine's," built in a
meadow beside the line, at the other end of the tunnel.
The long-since ruined chapel of St. Catherine narrowly

154 Cycle Rides round London

escaped complete demolition on that occasion ; but it
still stands, roofless and desecrated, as it has done for
centuries past. Perhaps, in these days of restorations
and revivals, it will be brought back to a decent condition
of repair, even as was the hilltop chapel of St. Martha's
near by. With this speculation we will make for
Guildford, and the conclusion of this lengthy run.

THE SUBURBAN THAMES

This run of thirty-seven or thirty-eight miles commences
at Esher and Claremont Station, situated within a
hundred yards or so of the old Portsmouth road that
passes through Esher village. Leaving the station
behind, you turn to the right at the high road, and so
come up a gentle, mile-long incline to Esher, where,
instead of wheeling up the long street, the first turning
to the right is taken for Hersham. This leads to a fine
gravel road passing between Esher new church and the
village green, with the lodge gates of Esher Place show-
ing prominently away to the right. In the grounds, in
a low-lying meadow by the river Mole, stands the
picturesque battlemented Gatehouse, all that is left of
the once proud, but unhealthy, palace of Cardinal
Wolsey, built long before Hampton Court. When the
Cardinal lost favour with Henry the Eighth, that
autocratic monarch commanded him to retire to this
damp and objectionable retreat. Some of the fallen
statesman's letters are still in existence, written from
this spot, complaining of the " moist and corrupt" air.

It is a delightful coast down for some distance
towards Hersham, along a quite unspoiled road, cross-
ing a bridge that spans the Mole. Hersham, a hamlet
where four roads meet, is in summer a by no means

165

156 Cycle Rides round London

unpleasing place, but the contemplative wayfarer, think-
ing of its fortunes all round the calendar, wonders how
the inhabitants of this, and places similarly remote, can
exist through the dull winter's days without feeling
buried alive.

Keeping to the right through Hersham, the way to
Weybridge lies along a road bordering Burwood Park,
and shaded by solemn pines, coming at length up a
slight rise to a heathy expanse just outside Walton-
on-Thames railway station. Keep straight on, with

the railway on the right hand, for a mile, and then turn
right along an excellent straight road for another mile,
leading direct down into Weybridge.

That once pleasant village is rapidly being spoiled.
Its healthy surrounding of heaths and pine-woods, and
its position on the Wey and near the Thames, together
with the fact of being situated on the South- Western
main line, have caused the building of innumerable
villas and the transformation of the quiet, old-fashioned
village street into a suburban thoroughfare. The small
green is still left, and on it a memorial column to the
Duchess of York, who died more than eighty years ago
at Oatlands Park, close by. It is surmounted by a
pyramidal stone supporting a ducal coronet. If it were

The Suburban Thames

157

not for the very curious history that belongs to it, the
column would not be worth much attention.

How few, however, know that history, or that it once
stood in the centre of the street at Seven Dials, near
Drury Lane! It was the pillar, in fact, that supported
the seven-sided sundial once presenting a face to each
of the seven radiating streets which centred at that
spot. It was originally
erected there about 1694,
and stood until July
1 773, when it was thrown
down by a party of ad-
venturers who, possessed
by the singular idea
that there was treasure
buried at the base, ex-
cavated it, and found —
nothing. The stones
then occupied a neglec-
ted corner in a London
stonemason's yard for
many years, until, in-
deed, they were pur-
chased in 1822 by the
inhabitants of VVeybridge for the present purpose.
The large block of stone originally supporting the
dials may be seen embedded in the pathway near
the " Ship Inn," where it was long used as a mounting-
block for horsemen ; but it seems, curiously enough,
to be only six-sided. The holes where the gnomons of
the dials were fixed are still visible in the stone.

THE SEVEN-DIALS PILLAR,
VVEYBRIDGE.

158 Cycle Rides round London

Oatlands Park, where the Duchess of York once
lived, has long been converted into a riverside hotel, in
whose grounds the gravestones of her pet dogs, to the
number of sixty or so, are still to be seen. There lie
" Pepper," " Faithful Queenie," " Topsy " and " Dinah,"
and many another. "Julia" has the most elaborate
epitaph —

' ' Here Julia rests, and here each day

Her mistress strews her grave with flowers,
Mourning her death whose froUc play

Enlivened oft the lonesome hours.
From Denmark did her race descend,

Beauteous her form and mild her spirit ;
Companion gay, and faithful friend —

May ye who read have half her merit."

Close by these memorials is still to be seen the two-
storeyed grotto built by a Duke of Newcastle at a
cost, it' is said, of ^^40,000. It engrossed the labour
of two men — father and son — for some years, and is
decorated with shells, spars, marbles, and stalactites,
said to be of rare varieties, but not a little shabby and
dingy nowadays.

From Weybridge we make for Chertsey, crossing the
Wey, and running beside the now beautiful canal, and
then crossing the equally beautiful Bourne. Soon after
passing this stream there is a choice of roads. Do not
turn to the left to Addlestone, but keep straight on,
past Addlestone Moor, where turn to the right, and
then the first to the left. This road leads direct to
Chertsey, where it crosses the main street of that place
at right angles, close to the railway station.

Chertsey is a quite commonplace little town, with

The Suburban Thames 159

streets of that would-be smartness that succeeds only in
being pretentiously mean ; and church and Town Hall
alike were erected in that most tasteless period which
stretched between the beginning and the middle of
last century. Chertsey Abbey once stood behind the
present church, but the site is now a market garden,
and the most interesting relics of it are to be seen in
the Architectural Museum at Westminster in the shape
of a set of tiles illustrating the legend of King Arthur.
There is a house in Guildford Street, however, that
should arrest the attention of the literary pilgrim. It
is the quaint, Dutch-like red brick mansion where
Cowley the poet lived — now named " Cowley House,"
partly for that hero-worshipping reason, and partly
because since its fine old porch, which once straddled
across the pavement, has been destroyed, its old title
of " Porch House " has ceased to be descriptive.

At one end of the town is Chertsey Bridge, but the
Thames here is at its tamest and the meads on either
side at their flattest — admirable, possibly, from the point
of view of the cows that graze in them, but not from
that of the sight-seer.

Having thus shown our contempt of Chertsey, let us
pursue the uneven tenor of our way, returning whence
we came until Pyrcroft Road, at the end of the town, is
seen, turning off to the right. Having turned into this
road, take neither the first to the left nor the one to
the right, but keep ahead, on the road past the
" Carpenters' Arms," and then, having passed that inn,
take the left-hand at a fork in the road. This
immediately brings the traveller to an old-fashioned

i6o

Cycle Rides round London

lane, bordered on the left by a tall red brick wall,
supported -at regular intervals by a long series of
buttresses, which now appear to be themselves in need
of buttressing. Over this decrepit wall can be glimpsed

CC "'Vlt^

PYRCROFT HOUSE.

the upper part of the old mansion of Pyrcroft House,
which has long enjoyed the local reputation of having
served Dickens as a model for the house at Chertsey
burgled by Bill Sikes. Sikes and his companions,

The Suburban Thames i6i

according to the story, hurried through the main street
of Chertsey, and "cleared the town as the church bell
struck two. Quickening their pace, they turned up a
road upon the left hand. After walking about a quarter
of a mile they stopped before a detached house sur-
rounded by a wall, to the top of which Toby Crackit,
scarcely pausing to take breath, climbed in a twinkling."
The wall is a particularly high one, and the scaling of
it does credit to Mr. Toby Crackit's agility.

Past this literary landmark the road immediately
begins to mount St. Ann's Hill, passing an inn on the
right with the odd sign of the " Golden Grove." Notice
the great tree in front of it, and the summer-house built
high up in its branches, and approached by a flight of
stairs.

Now comes a rise so steep as to be scarce worth
riding. Keep straight on, disregarding two tiirnings
to the left. Here is the summit of St. Ann's Hill, a
delightful open woodland. From this point commences
the descent, by a steep lane with loose gravel at all
seasons of the year. The cautious cyclist will walk this,
down to the junction with the road to Thorpe, where
we turn left, and, crossing the Bourne where a pretty
mill stands, continue by a winding, but level, gravelled
road to the hamlet of Th(jrpe, pretty and secluded.
Continuing through this, we turn to the left for Virginia
Water, three miles ahead, passing the railway station of
the same name half-way. The place is heralded for
some distance down the road by the handsome and
imposing buildings of the Holloway Sanatorium.
With the exception of that cheery-looking red brick

i62 Cycle Rides round London

institution, the scanty modern settlement called
Virginia Water (although the lake so-called is a mile
and a half away) is a singularly depressing place — a
wilderness of railway bridges, embankments, and curves,
well calculated to undo all the good the air, the pine-
woods, and the sandy soil of this district are said to
effect. A straight, flat sandy road leads hence, and
reaches the real Virginia Water opposite the " Wheat-
sheaf," a well-known and very ugly, inn, frequented by
picnic parties, and the stopping-place of the summer
coach from town.

A gate in the wooden fence beside the inn opens
immediately to the lake. The boys who hang about
this gate and sell green apples, of which the very sight
is almost sufficient to induce stomach-ache, tell the
unwary that cycles are not allowed within, thereby
deceiving many, and earning innumerable twopences
for "minding" the machines. It is well to. disregard
what they have to say, and to manoeuvre the cycle
through the gate. Here we are within the bounds of
Windsor Great Park. Directly in front stretches the
beautiful sheet of water, said, on insufficient authority,
to be " the largest artificial lake in England." It is,
however, very large: one and a half miles long, and
with two arms, each half a mile in length. It was
formed considerably over a hundred years ago by
intercepting the waters of the Bourne, a little stream
rising near Ascot and falling into the Thames at
Chertsey, and by damming them in a natural hollow.
The general idea was originated by the Duke of
Cumberland, and the design was that of Paul Sandby,

The Suburban Thames 163

one of our early water-colourists. The name given to
the lake derives from the Duke of Cumberland being at
the time Governor of Virginia.

Surrounded on every side by dense woods of solemn
pines, the place is very impressive. Turning to the left,
and following the grassy shore for a little way, turn down
a road bearing to the left again, away from the water.
This leads down to the waterfall, down which the waters
of the Bourne splash on their way to liberty and the
Thames. The fall is made of great masses of rock piled
up ingeniously to resemble a natural ravine. Shaded by
trees and fringed by rushes, the scene is really very
pretty. The rough stone bridge whence you view it,
formed of immense slabs of rock, is not unlike those
early British bridges found on Dartmoor — only more
elaborate. If only this were not a modern imitation,
how professional antiquaries would rave about it, to be
sure!

Crossing this, and coming up a rise, one reaches the
famous " ruins " by continuing ahead, by the shores of
the lake. They stand on a broad lawn stretching away
back from the water, and were built to resemble a ruined
temple. They are thus sham ruins, and, knowing that,
the visitor perversely refuses to receive the romantic
thrill otherwise appropriate ; which shows that pic-
turesqueness is a matter more of sentiment than of form.
As a matter of fact, the columns themselves are genuine
antiques, from Corinth and from Tunis, the spoils of
ruined temples of those sunny climes, brought here to
moulder in the damp and rigours of a northern climate.
The "ruins" themselves are growing ruinous, for two

164

Cycle Rides round London

of the most picturesque of the Corinthian columns, with
their architrave, have recently fallen, and lie, a confused
heap, on the grass amid the other prostrate stones
carefully arranged in disorder over a century since.

Leaving Virginia Water by the way we came, and
turning to the right, as though for Bagshot, a right-hand
road is immediately seen, with a finger-post directing to

THE RUINS, VIRGINIA WATER.

Ascot and Bracknell. This is a fine undulating stretch
of sandy road following the palings of Windsor Park as
far as the hamlet of Black Nest, where it bears to the
left and goes direct, past Sunninghill, to Ascot, Bullbrook,
and Bracknell. Nothing is seen of Sunninghill save
the post-office on the left hand. A modern inn, also on
the left, bearing the sign of " The Wells," will be noticed.

The Suburban Thames 165

It derives its name from a chalybeate spring in the
garden.

Ascot, to which we now come, up a rise, is a depressing
backwoods-settlement kind of a place, with no history
except that which belongs to a hundred years of horse-
racing. The village (for such, presumably, it should be
called) is singular in consisting of practically a one-sided
street. This is made up of a row of shops and villas
and the back of the long range of buildings belonging
to the racecourse, a white clock-tower overlooking all.
The whole place is built on what was once the desolate
heath of Ascot — and looks it ! " Royal Ascot " they call
it in the racing season, and it may look the part with
the fashionable and gaily-dressed crowds then assembled,
but few places can possibly appear so forlorn at any
other time.

The cyclist welcomes the fine long descent that
enables him to hurry away. Indeed, the splendid coasts
one may get on the way from Black Nest to Bracknell
form practically the only good features of these six
miles ; and in fine weather they are exhilarating. But
when slithering through the mud that succeeds a showery
day, with, perhaps, the hoarse-tongued bell of Ascot
Priory sounding like a funeral knell in one's ears, this bit
of country weighs heavily on one's spirits.

Bullbrook, which lies in a hollow and is just a
modern hamlet of Bracknell, is succeeded by a sharp
rise to Bracknell itself, a little town of no particular
interest. Turn down here to the left, past the (modern)
church. Coming to Bracknell Station, turn to the left
across the bridge that spans the railway, and then the

1 66 Cycle Rides round London

second to the right, if you wish to look at the (also
modern) church of Easthampstead, Returning from
this, bear to the right, then first to the left, and then
to the right again, along the palings of South Hill
Park, and you are on the straight four-mile stretch to
Bagshot, through the densest pine-woods all the way,
with grass rides now and again on either side, giving
views of infinities of pines. It is a lonely road, aromatic
with the odours of these woodlands, and reverberant
with the scurrying of the partridges or the hollow
ejaculations of the pheasants. Perhaps a hare or
rabbit scuttles across the road, or you may meet a
velveteen-coated gamekeeper, his gun under his arm ;
but never another cyclist. It is a splendid road for
speed, going in this direction, and the four miles may
be done with ease in a quarter of an hour, Nearing
the Bagshot end, the gates of the Duke of Connaught's
seat, Bagshot Park, are passed, and turning to the right,
over the railway bridge, Bagshot village is reached, past
an old white-faced inn — the " Cricketers."

Bagshot is not the busy place it was in the old
coaching days, when, standing as it does on the old
road to Exeter, it did a big trade with passing travellers.
Its old inns are mostly gone, with the stories that
belonged to them ; but the " King's Arms " remains,
and the tale of how the " Golden Farmer " was brought
a captive to its door one night. The person who went
by that name lived on the hill outside Bagshot, and was
known for always paying his debts in gold, instead of
by bills or cheques. Contemporary with him was a
terrible highwayman who never took anything but

The Suburban Thames 167

gold coin off the coach-passengers whom he plundered
on Bagshot Heath, rejecting jewellery or notes. One
night a more than usually courageous traveller shot
him when his back was turned, and when the wounded
highwayman was brought here, he was discovered to be
the highly respectable farmer who paid only in specie.
He was eventually tried, found guilty, hanged, and
gibbeted on his own threshold, on the "Jolly Farmer"
hill, on the way to Yorktown,

A winding lane leads out of the south side of
Bagshot's one street to Windlesham, a mile and a half
distant, falling to the left across the Windle brook.
The village is mildly pretty, the rebuilt church wildly
grotesque. Away to the right, in the distance, rise the
bleak and barren Chobham Ridges, and three miles
and a half onward, away from the Ridges, is Chobham
village, the roads to it duly sign-posted and the way
alternating with patches of heath and pine trees
and with cultivated fields, won with much toil and
expense from the hungry Bagshot sands. To the
north of Chobham village lies the bleak and barren
common, and the hamlet curiously named Up Down.
On the common took place the elaborate military
picnic, dignified by the name of " manoeuvres," over
forty years ago, at a time when the military system of
the country was at its lowest ebb of inefficiency.

Chobham village is old-world, and being quite far
removed from any railway station, and rather inacces-
sible, is consequently unspoiled. The Bourne stream
runs picturesquely down one side of the village street
in a deep and narrow channel, spanned by footbridges

1 68 Cycle Rides round London

and bordered by a row of pollarded limes. Quaint old
brick and half-timbered houses are a feature of the
place. The church, with sturdy stone tower and leaden
spire, is unusually rugged and weather-beaten, and is
roofed with stone slabs instead of with the more usual
tiles ; altogether a homely and cosy village, that seems
to have no sort of commerce with the outer world, and
would appear to be rather proud of the fact.

Turning back from the village, and then turning to
the right, four miles, mostly of ghastly heath, that
might fitly have been the scene where the three
witches met Macbeth, interpose between this and the
hamlet of Ottershaw, where there are cross-roads, a
chapel built by Sir Gilbert Scott, and Ottershaw Park,
in which, secluded from the road and adjoining the
mansion, is a kitchen built in the shape of a church
by a former proprietor, who must have had the greatest
reverence for his stomach. Turning to the left after
passing the cross-roads, we reach Chertsey, past the
well-wooded park of Botleys, and come again into
that uninteresting town over the level crossing at the
railway station.

THE SOUTHERN SUBURBS : KINGSTON
TO EWELL, WARLINGHAM, AND
CROYDON

The circular tour of twenty-eight miles here mapped out
does not take us very far afield. It follows the outer
fringe of the southern suburbs, and is planned the more
especially to afford the Londoner some idea of what the
country adjoining the Surrey hills — soon, alas ! to be
swallowed up by the ever-extending bricks and mortar
— is like. It may also prove valuable to those who
are seeking a suitable home just beyond London's
smoke.

Starting from Kingston we make for Norbiton Church,
and, leaving it to the right, take the next turning to
the right beyond. This is Coombe Lane, and though
not so direct as the turning just before Norbiton Church,
is infinitely preferable, leading gently upwards along a
lane with farms and a few scattered houses, and, passing
under a railway bridge, coming, in two miles from
Kingston Station, to the hamlet of Coombe. Turn here,
when up the rise, to the right, where a sign-post marks
the way to Maiden. A fine coast down leads in a mile
to Coombe and Maiden Station and the commonplace
modern settlement of New Maiden.

Now straight ahead, past this spot, turning to the

189

1 70 Cycle Rides round London

right again at a fork of the roads where a country inn,
called the " Plough," stands and points to Ewell. It is
very pretty and rural here. Just after turning down
this road we come to Old Maiden, with its quaint red
brick church on the right hand. Here a very beautiful
lane, shaded by a fine avenue, leads on a down gradient
for a mile and a quarter, with pretty views on the right
to the valley of the not very charmingly named Hogs-
mill River, and with dense coppices and undergrowth
fringing the left. This is the border of Worcester Park.
Where this lane ends and joins a broad highway, running

Kingston

Evy.a

.oombe

KtwAlaldeii

'oidMalden

Riddlcsdown*^

\rickl4S
A Hole.

yfh^ttlujt ">_^^

^Cfltlsfijtn

■Warlingfiam

to right and left, turn to the left, coming in two miles to
Ewell, where the Hogsmill River expands into a broad
pond beside the village street, outside the gates of a
beautiful park.

Notice the curious fishing temple built into the park
wall, overhanging the pond. On the left-hand road,
leading to London, is the modern parish church, with
the romantically ivied tower of the old building still
standing beside it. There are many and puzzling roads
at Ewell, but, fortunately, there are many people about
of whom to ask the way, and sign-posts are not wanting.
If it were a lonely place they would be sought in vain.

The Southern Suburbs 171

Take the road to Cheam, resisting all temptations to turn
to the right. This brings us to Nonsuch Park, bordering
the road on the left hand, and then into the old-world
village of Cheam, where the new order of things is only
just beginning to make itself felt. There are still
numerous old boarded cottages here. The old church,
like that of Ewell, has been pulled down, but the chancel
still remains, near the new one, and one can look through
a grating in the door and get a glimpse at the interior
and its monuments well enough.

A mile and a quarter brings us to Sutton, whose
High Street we cross just where the historic " Cock "
coaching inn stood until pulled down a few years ago.
Sutton is, perhaps, although very populous, one of the
prettiest suburbs we have. After crossing the High
Street the road presently goes steeply down to Carshal-
ton. It is not too steep to coast, only be sure that no
tradesmen's light carts are in the way. Carshalton,
with its broad ponds, fed by the Wandle, beside the
road, is altogether delightful. Swans majestically sail
the broad, if shallow, waters ; weeping willows dip their
long branches in the stream, and picturesquely wooded
islands are dotted here and there. The small boys of
Carshalton (" K'shalton," they call it) are never tired of
fishing here from the railings beside the dusty road, and
not a few children of a larger growth may be seen
casting a line. Now and again they bring out an old
umbrella or a worn-out boot discarded by a passing
tramp, but the trout, angled for by the thousand fisher-
men of the place, are coy; and even the usually head-
strong "tiddler," generally caught by the infantile piece

172 Cycle Rides round London

of cotton, declines to be caught and immured in the
pickle-bottle brought forth for him.

A circular iron railing in the roadway, between the
church and the water, encloses a well called *' Anne
Boleyn's," from the tradition that the water first burst forth
when her horse's hoof sank in the then marshy ground.

Having refreshed yourself with a sight of these
pleasant waters, continue to Beddington, whose ancient
church, on a by-road to the left, has a wonderful store of
ancient brasses. Unhappily, the church is not open for
prayer, or for antiquaries, and search must be made for
the keys. The road now rises, with craggy banks of
sand on either side, and then comes to a modern and
most elaborate inn, the " Plough." The road to the
right, called Plough Lane, is our route. It leads by
pleasant ways, free from houses, to Purley, crossing
Russell Hill, whence, beside a field of waving oats, the
eye ranges across to Croydon and on to Sydenham Hill,
where the Crystal Palace glitters in the sunshine in a
manner fully befitting its name.

Down goes the road in a long descent to Purley, where
we cross the old Brighton road, and, passing beneath
the railway, gently ascend the fine highway to Riddles-
down. Here we are amid the Surrey hills, which spread
out in a lovely panorama of hills and valleys to the
right. Riddlesdown is a place for picnickers and school
treats. Continuing past it, we come to the hamlet of
Whyteleafe, and under a railway bridge up a steep lane
to the left, which speedily becomes too steep to ride.
Half a mile's walk, and you can mount again.

Inquiring the way to Upper Warlingham along the

The Southern Suburbs

175

puzzling by-lanes, that remote village, on its elevated
tableland, is reached in less than a mile. When there,
carefully ascertain the way to Fickles Hole, situated
three miles and a half away, past the tiny village of
Chelsham, by rather intricate by-lanes. This, although
not so far from London, is an exceedingly lonely country,
whose solitary lanes run through thick woods. Very
beautiful they are, too.

Coming downhill
past Chelsham Church
on the left, continue
bearing round to the
left, and the small
hamlet of Fickles Hole,
or Fairchild, as it is
sometimes called,
comes in view, with
the " White Bear
Inn," in whose gar-
den stands the great
white wooden effygy
that used once to
adorn the " White
Bear," Piccadilly, a

coaching inn standing where the Criterion Restaurant
now towers aloft. For many years it stood in the
shrubbery of Fairchild House, and frightened the
tramps. It once more represents the bruin (or brewing)
interest. When strange dogs catch sight of the effigy
they generally run away terrified.

Leaving Fickles Hole for Croydon, turn to the left,

LEAVING CARSHALTON.

176 Cycle Rides round London

and by a long downhill lane over Addington Downs to
Coombe (not to be confounded with the Kingston
Coombe), taking the second turning to the left at a point
two and a half miles away, where a sign-post clearly
directs to Croydon. Three miles more, by a beautiful
road, and we are in the heart of Croydon, whence train
home.

EWELL TO MERSTHAM, GODSTONE,
AND LINGFIELD

This route is the way by which Surbiton, Kingston,
and Richmond cyclists reach the Brighton road. We
will pick up the route at Ewell, which may be made a
starting-point.

It is a long, long ascent toward the ridge of the
North Downs, all the way from Ewell to Banstead
Heath ; not necessarily a tiring one unless a south
wind is blowing, but when it blows great guns from
that quarter, then — why, then go home and wait until
it comes from some other direction ! Fortunately, the
road-surface is excellent, and, coming in the reverse
direction, there is not, probably, such another lengthy
and uninterrupted a coast-down in the neighbourhood
of London.

Three miles from Ewell, Nork Park, distinguished
from far away by its dense hillside woods, is passed
on the right, and we come to the beginnings of Burgh
Heath. Here, at a turning to the left, there stands,
at some distance from the road, an ancient tumulus
surrounded by fir trees for the wonderment of those
who care to go and seek it. Burgh Heath is a portion
of the wild, unenclosed uplands including Banstead
Downs, Walton Downs, Epsom Downs, and Walton

12

178 Cycle Rides round London

Heath. The cyclist may notice in passing a number
of ramshackle wooden shanties in the midst of the
heath. These are the property of the descendants
of those squatters who placed them here so long ago
that they have obtained a prescriptive right, and cannot
be evicted.

At the turning to Tadworth, at a point known locally
as " Wilderness Bottom," keep to the left, unless,
indeed, you desire to explore the village, which was
notable a little while since as being the country
retreat of Lord Russell, the Lord Chief Justice, who
resided at Tadworth Court.

Passing through Kingswood, we come up and down
hill, and finally down, to Gatton, against the lodge
gates of Gatton Park, once the seat of Lord Monson,
but now the property of Mr. Colman, of the famous
mustard firm. There is a public footpath through
this very beautiful park, and the house is shown from
2 p.m. to 4. Cycles, however, must be left within the
lodge gates. But although the pictures are very fine,
and the Marble Hall worth seeing, the average visitor
will doubtless be much more interested in the so-called
" Town Hall " of Gatton, a kind of miniature summer-
house in the shape of a classic temple, situated in midst
of a lovely clump of scented limes in front of the house.
It should be said that Gatton is not, and never was, a
village. It is just a big park, with a manorial church
adjoining the house. But Gatton was a parliamentary
borough, and returned two members to Parliament,
from the reign of Henry the Sixth, until it was dis-
franchised by the first Reform Act in 1832. With the

EWELL TO MeRSTHAM AND LiNGFIELD 1 79

sole exception of Old Sarum it was the rottenest of
" rotten boroughs," and contained not a single elector.
It was a "pocket borough," that went with the Park
as a property. Cobbett, who was nothing if not down-
right and brutally frank, says, " You pass Gatton, which
is a very rascally spot of earth." So it was, for the

^•^ Iwellffmdon i B»5 C R

Lmerstham

\ GOBSTOKC

political power wielded by its owner was almost always
exercised in the interest of bribery and corruption, and
Lord Monson, who purchased the property in 1830
for ;^ 1 00,000, did so with the idea of securing a splendid
investment, to return him about a hundred per cent. ;
but in less than two years Reform had destroyed its
value. So frankly corrupt were those times that we

i8o

Cycle Rides round London

can only wonder why Lord Monson did not cynically
prefer a claim for compensation. The " Town Hall,"
therefore, is merely a satirical kind of freak, while the
inscription of " Vox populi suprema lex," among others
inscribed on the pedestal of the urn that forms the sole
ornament of the building, is an example of a former
owner's sardonic humour.

Rather than face the dangerous descent of Reigate

Hill, we will, on returning
to the Park gates, turn to
the right, and make for
Merstham, a pretty old-
world village on the main
Brighton road ; bearing
continually to the right un-
til opposite the " Feathers,"
after which, take the road
that dips down to the left,
to Nutfield. This goes in
winding fashion for two
miles, and then comes up
a short, sharp rise to the
church, standing promi-
nently on a high bank above the left-hand side of the
road, and containing a stained-glass window designed
by Burne Jones. The apoplectic hue of the figures'
faces is exceedingly unpleasing.

Past the church, where a road runs right and left,
turn left, and so through the few houses of Nutfield
to Bletchingley, down whose hillside street we come
with caution. The old church has an odd tower, and

THE "TOWN HALL,
GATTON.

EWELL TO MeRSTHAM AND LiNGFIELD l8l

contains a tomb with some pretty Elizabethan verses
to Sir Thomas Cadwallader. Note the huge and
bombastical monument to a former Lord Mayor of
London, occupying the whole of the east end of the
south aisle. The effigies of the worthy knight and
his lady seem to represent them singing an operatic

t;5ftAKr^v-' y '>**v

THE HOLLOW ROAD, NUTFIELD.

duet, while attendant marble cherubs, with swollen
faces suggestive of toothache, shed stony tears.

In less than two miles we reach Godstone, and,
passing its green and village pond, and the " White
Hart," its famous old hostelry, turn sharply to the
left, and then take the first broad road to the right.

1 82 Cycle Rides round London

This is the Oxted road ; but instead of proceeding
quite so far as that village, we will, in a mile and a
half, turn to the right for Tandridge, a hamlet with
an ancient church, in whose churchyard notice the
monument to the wife of Sir Gilbert Scott, the architect
who restored (and helped to spoil) so many of our
cathedrals. See, also, the ancient oak internal framing
of the tower, and the tragical tombstone to Thomas
Todman, 178 1, aged thirty-one years, at the side of
the south porch, Thomas Todman was a smuggler,
who was shot dead by a Custom House officer. The
inscription is curious. Here it is, oddities of spelling
and punctuation preserved : —

"Thou Shall do no Murder, nor Shalt thou Steal
are the Commands Jehovah did Reveal
but thou O Wretch, Without fear or dread
of thy Tremendous Maker Shot me dead.
Amidst my strength my sins forgive
As I through Boundless Mercy
hope to live."

Downhill from Tandridge and into the Weald, turning
to the left by the railway, and following it for a mile.
Then bear to the right, and enter the pretty village
of Crowhurst, with its interesting church showing to
the right of the road. One of the curios it contains
is an elaborate cast-iron tomb-" stone," on the chancel
floor, with figures and raised inscription, dated 1591
— a relic of the days when iron was mined and smelted
in this Wealden district. This is one of several
memorials connected with the Gaynesford family, once
Lords of the Manor here, and so remaining for over
three hundred and sixty years. Their old manor-house,

EWELL TO MeRSTHAM AND LiNGFIELD 1 83

now a farmhouse, and a very picturesque and in-
teresting one, called Crowhurst Place, is only a mile
distant.

It will be noticed that many of the letters on the
iron slab are either cast in reverse or upside down.
Mrs. "Ane Forstr," it can readily be seen, was exceed-
ingly proud of her descent. A very odd fact is that
exact replicas of this cast-iron slab are found dis-
tributed throughout Surrey, and even in some places
in Sussex ; not always in the most decorous positions.

y^WaT^V^!dy^HW■^^^^^^,>^.'^l^^■li^^|f^f^^^^Ml'^^*^|l^t^^FTTT

inlEK:UETIH!-AKii: fe@i^$,T

DECEASED : XYSIU :@SL

^ji„K^^^^^^p.*^*^^A^>i^Xr^P.*^.*^.*ji.»j^.*jtfuucr.

AN IRON TOMB-SI.AB.

There is, for example, one used as a fire-back in the
kitchen of a farm adjoining Crowhurst Church itself,
and others have been noted at Ewhurst, Godstone,
and Horley, where one formed part of the flooring of
a baker's oven, and occasionally produced breakfast-
table terrors in the neighbourhood when the domestic
loaf of bread was found to be impressed with " Her
lieth," "deceased," and other portions of the design,
including the shrouded body in the centre. The simple
explanation of this odd distribution is that the iron-
founding firm must have found the mould ready to
their hands when cheap fire-backs were wanted, and so

1 84

Cycle Rides round London

cast them in this guise. It mattered little when few
people could read.

The great yew tree in Crowhurst churchyard is
among the very largest in the land, measuring thirty-
two feet nine inches round its immense trunk at a

c^-^}^-ui

THE ANCIENT YEW, CROWHURST.

height of five feet from the ground. It is thought to
be about twelve hundred years old, and although it was
greatly mutilated over eighty years ago by some
local vandals, who thought how fine a thing it would
be to scoop out the interior and to fix table and
benches inside, for the accommodation of some twenty

EWELL TO MeRSTHAM AND LiNGFIELD 1 85

persons, the tree still flourishes. When this wanton
outrage was performed, an ancient cannon-ball was
discovered in the very heart of the trunk.

Three miles more of country lanes, and our journey
ends at Lingficld, a modern horse-racing centre. Here
a train may be found for the return to town.

HEVER CASTLE, PENSHURST, AND
TONBRIDGE

Here is a circular journey of the apparently modest
total of thirty-three miles. If, however, we consider
that a portion of it is hilly, and that the whole abounds
with places to be seen, why, then, this is by no means
a short route. Any portion of this irregularly shaped
circle is within easy access of a railway station — Wester-
ham, Edenbridge, Hever, Penshurst, Tonbridge of
course — Hildenborough, Sevenoaks, and Brasted — all
having stations of their own. It matters little from
which point you begin the round. Let us, however,
say Westerham, to which access is obtained on the
railway by the branch line from Dunton Green.
Westerham is a terminus, a large village or small town
lying beneath the shadow of the immemorial hills, along
whose steep sides, marked by a line of occasional ancient
yews, goes the old Pilgrims' Way between Winchester
and Canterbury. The great historic figure connected
with Westerham is General Wolfe, the victor of Quebec.
There is a cenotaph to him in the parish church, and
another in Squerryes Park, just outside the village.
The vicarage, too, was his birthplace.

Westerham has nothing in common with modernity.
It seems to have had a great era of building in the

18U

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge 187

time of Queen Anne and of the early Georges, and to
have exhausted itself in the effort ; which is equal
to saying that Westerham is delightfully old - world,
with great red brick mansions and old gardens, and
elbow-room everywhere. Here is the picturesque begin-
ning of the river Darenth, crossing the road on its way
down to Darenth and Dartford, to turn many mills,
and to finally lose itself in the defiled waters of the

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lower Thames. The road descends from Westerham
to Edenbridge, passing on the way the fork of the
road where a guide-post directs by a short route to
Chiddingstone, Hever, and Penshurst, vid Fair Elms.
We will not turn here, but continue straight on to
Crockham Hill, past the wild beauty of Crockham Hill
Common, coming to the modern hamlet and church,
set amid wide-spreading hop gardens. Two miles on-
ward from this point we pass Edenbridge Station,
and in another half-mile Edenbridge " Town " Station,
and finally, in nearly another mile, come to Eden-

1 88 Cycle Rides round London

bridge itself, by no means a place of that metropolitan
character the traveller would expect to find after all
this heralding of railways.

Edenbridge is old-world and pretty, as surely it
should be with such a name. It savours of Arcadian
delights ; and, indeed, when you have left Edenbridge
Station behind you are come to a village that has little
commerce with the outer world. True, folks hereabouts
call Edenbridge " the town " ; but there are towns and
towns, and this is no centre of activity. The station
is half a mile away, the railway conveniently out of
sight of the village street, and life here flows as gently,
and with as even a current, as that of the little river
Eden, that gives the place its idyllic name.

Edenbridge — as surely is fitting — is set round about
with apple -orchards, which render it as fragrant in
spring as its neighbouring hop gardens do in the
late summer months. The first thing, however, that
attracts the Londoner's attention is the quaintness of
the one village street, with its tile-hung cottages and
the sign of that comfortable old hostelry, the " Crown "
Hotel, spanning the width of the road. Edenbridge
also contains within its bounds quite a notable clock,
of which the inhabitants are justly proud. No stranger
can explore the recesses of the old church on the
hillside without being presently buttonholed by a
villager, who will take him round to where this time-
piece shows its black face on the sturdy tower, and will
point out to him the singular fact that all the V's
among the gilded numerals are turned the wrong way.
But this is not all. The clock — like the heroine of

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge 189

the modern novel — has a " past." It was made in
1738, and was the clock of St George's, Southwark,
until 1808, when, on the old church being pulled
down, it Wets sold to the vicar and churchwardens of

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Ultfer Ca-ttie,

Edenbridge. It should be a testimony to the health-
giving properties of the Kentish air when it is said
that since it came down from London it has never
known a day's illness, save only those slight ailments

190 Cycle Rides round London

incidental to old age, that can be rectified by the
application of a little oil.

When the cyclist has taken his survey of Eden-
bridge, his next place of pilgrimage should be Hever.

Though only three miles from Edenbridge, and but
twenty - seven from Victoria, Hever is not so well
known to the excursionist as it should be, when one
considers how eminently beautiful and historical is its
castle. Here, then, is the way to it. Coming to the
bridge across the river Eden, we cross, and look out
for a turning on the left hand by a boarded cottage.
This leads across a railway and then along a pretty
winding lane, bringing one easefully to the spot in
two miles. The little Eden wanders erratically through
the level lands, and all is quiet and rustic.

Look out for Hever, lest you miss it, for beside
its grey old church, with the shingled spire, there is
little else. Just a farm, a cottage or so, and an inn
— the " Henry the Eighth," formerly the " Bull and
Butcher," or, as legends would have it, the " Boleyn
Butchered." For this was the Kentish home of the
beautiful and unfortunate Anne. They still tell you
how Henry, ardent lover, used to come riding through
the lanes to see his "dearest pet," the fair chatelaine
of Hever Castle, down yonder, amid the oozy water-
meadows, and how, bogged in those miry ways, the
rustics would pull the Defender of the Faith out of
the sloughs. Here, too, in Hever Church may still
be seen the altar -tomb and the magnificent brass of
Sir Thomas Boleyn, my Lord of Wiltshire and Ormonde,
Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge 193

ennobled and decorated father of that charmer. Another
exquisite brass is that in the chancel to Margaret
Cheyne, 14 19.

Downhill from Hever Church, surrounded still by
its ancient moat, is the unspoiled castle, a small but
perfect example of the fortified manor-house of the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The
greater part of the present building was erected in
the later years of Henry the Sixth, and was added
to in Elizabeth's time. The Boleyns first became con-
nected with it about 1460, when Sir Geoffrey Boleyn,
mercer and Lord Mayor of London, purchased the
ruined place and commenced to build anew ; but be-
fore he could complete this reconstruction he was
gathered to his fathers, and it remained for his son
Sir Thomas — father of the ill-fated Anne — to com-
plete the work Sir Geoffrey had begun.

It is a private residence, and the interior is very
charily shown to strangers — on Wednesdays only.
The exterior and the moat, however, are always
readily accessible, and are very well worth seeing. The
lichened castle walls, with their time-stained masonry
and vivid patches of red brick, are extraordinarily
picturesque, and the windows, occurring at irregular
intervals, with the clustered chimneys and mantling
ivy, give the place a romantic quaintness all its own.
To complete the picture, apple-orchards face two sides
of the moat.

The lanes wind greatly, but are merely undulating,
on the route to Chiddingstone, two and a half miles
distant. Chiddingstone is generally found to be a
13

194 Cycle Rides round London

dream of beauty by enthusiastic visitors ; and the
visitor to this lovely hamlet cannot help being en-
thusiastic.

No less beautiful than Hever, but with a beauty
of quite a different character, it stands in a hollow at
the gates of Chiddingstone Park, whose magnificent
elms and chestnuts overhang in summer a row of old
timbered houses, sketched many hundreds of times on
paper or canvas by enthusiastic artists. The quaint
house next the park gates, in the accompanying
sketch, is the ideally placed " Castle Inn," that might,
both as regards its situation and its cosy, old-fashioned
interior, have inspired a Washington Irving to trans-
ports of eloquence. Everyone who has been to the
Royal Academy any year knows Chiddingstone, al-
though he may never have visited it ; for artists are
continually painting this loveliest of Kentish villages,
as it is called, and its embowering trees and quaint
timbered houses. Behind these houses, in a field, is
the "chiding stone," a large boulder of red sandstone,
outcropped from the underlying geological formation,
and said to have been a Druidical seat of judgment or
place of exhortation.

The roads grow lonely and degenerate (this ex-
pression purely from the cyclist's point of view), into
wooded lanes and tracts between Chiddingstone and
Penshurst. If, however, you have that which many
cyclists have not — that is to say, a real love of natural
woodland and copse, where the hazels grow and the
bracken and undergrowth are dense — then the walk
of two miles by footpaths through the coppices will

Hever Castle, Penshurst, and Tonbridge 195

be not the least enjoyable part of this trip. This
brings one to the scattered and very beautiful old
village of Penshurst surrounding the ancient baronial
home of the Sidneys, Penshurst Place. On three days
in the week — Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays — the
house is shown at an admission fee of one shilling. It

-^

CHIDDINGSTONE.

is said that these fees amount in the year to over
;^300, which gives the annual number of visitors at
more than six thousand. The Barons' Hall is the
chief point of interest, and is the oldest part of the
historic building, dating back to the fourteenth century.
Most famous of all the warlike and polite Sidneys
who owned Penshurst was Sir Philip Sidney, who fell

196

Cycle Rides round London

at the siege of Zutphen, and is the hero of that
chivalric action, the giving up, when wounded to death,
the cup of water for which he thirsted, so that a
wounded soldier might quench his thirst. " He has
more ,need of it than I," said this chivalric soul.

Among the historic pictures here is the remarkable
portrait of Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683 on

SUNSET ON THE EDEN.

Tower Hill. He met death in characteristic Sidney
fashion : —

"Are you ready, sir?" asked the headsman, when
he had laid his head on the block ; " will you rise
again ? "

"Not till the general resurrection. Strike on;" and
his head was severed from his body.

In the background of the portrait you see the
Tower of London and the headsman's block and axe.

Hever Castle, Penshukst, and Tonbridge 197

But to complete the round ; on good roads, again from
Penshurst to Pounds Bridge, through secluded country,
and thence to Speldhurst. At Pounds Bridge there is
a quite astonishingly quaint and old-world inn, gabled
and timbered, and with a sixteenth-century device and
monogram on it. From Speldhurst we go through
more forest country, and then turn left for Southborough,
where we are within hail of Tonbridge and Tunbridge
Wells and the great settlements of modern country
residences created by the healthy air and fine scenery.
Coming down Quarry Hill
into the town, the tourist
finds Tonbridge more in-
teresting than " the Wells,"
because it is quainter and
not so fashionable. There
are some impressive re-
mains of Tonbridge Castle
yet to be seen in the

grounds of a park near the end of the High Street, and
in that street is the old " Chequers," a house that no
artist nor any amateur photographer can resist.

Crossing the Medway, there now comes a long five
and a half miles to Sevenoaks, with only one village ; a
very little village with the very long name of Hilden-
borough. Thence it is a climb up the very steep River
Hill to Knole Park, bordering the right hand of the
road into Sevenoaks. Park and house, the property
of Lord Sackville, are open to the public ; the park
always, the house on Thursday and Saturday afternoons,
from 2 to 5 o'clock ; on Fridays and Bank Holidays 10

A CREST OF THE SIDNEYS.

198

Cycle Rides round London

to 5. Single visitors, 2s. ; parties of four, 6s, ; of seven,
los. There are Reynolds and Gainsborough pictures
among the great art collections, and there are as many
rooms in the house as there are days in the year ; but
only seventeen of them are shown.

From the town to Sevenoaks there is a very long and

SHOEING FORGE, PENSHURST.

steep run down to the station and to Riverhead. The
station is convenient for a return to town, but if it is
desired to complete the circle, there are the interesting
villages of Sundridge and Brasted to see, on the
excellent road to Westerham, with the long array of
the North Downs continually in sight.

TO STOKE POGES AND BURNHAM
BEECHES

A GLANCE at the accompanying chart might give the
impression of this being a somewhat complicated route ;
but as a matter of fact, although the outward journey is
almost wholly off the high roads, there should be no
difficulty in finding the way to Burnham Beeches along
this itinerary. The distance to be covered between
Egham and Hounslow is, allowing for all possible
deviations for exploring, thirty-five miles. Egham is
selected solely as a convenient starting-point whence to
reach the riverside road to Old Windsor, and by no
means for its own sake ; for the half-mile or so of high
road between the railway station and the point where
we turn sharply to the left for Old Windsor is probably
the vilest piece of macadam in the Home Counties ; if,
indeed, the mile-long continuation of it on to Staines is
not even worse. The river road is fortunately altogether
different, being a long sandy stretch passing through
the level of Runnymede, and after the first half-mile
affording delightful views of the Thames, To the left
hand rises the wooded height of Cooper's Hill from the
water meadows, and over to the right is Magna Charta
Island. Where the sandy road dips down to the water
just before reaching the village of Old Windsor, notice

109

200 Cycle Rides round London

that old-world inn, the " Bells of Ouseley," with its sign,
displaying five bells, picturesquely swinging from an
ancient elm. This sign is a puzzle to the wayfarer. It
derives from the once-famous bells in the tower of the
long-vanished Osney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated for
their sweet tones.

A choice of roads here confronts the tourist. The
pleasantest way to Old Windsor is by the easily rideable
towing-path for three-quarters of a mile, bringing one to

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poets

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a narrow lane, looking like a private road, leading to
past the little church of that village. Old Windsor
Church is a prettily situated building, itself of little
interest, although there may be those who will find food
for reflection in a sight of the last resting-place of
" Perdita " Robinson, the discarded early favourite of
the " First Gentleman in Europe." Her career can at
least serve to point a moral, if it cannot adorn a tale.
" Perdita " died December 26th, 1800 ; Florizel lived and
flourished for close upon thirty years longer. Grown
old, wheezy, and corpulent, drawn about Windsor Great

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 201

Park in a pony-carriage in his last days, and morosely
shunning the sight of his fellow-creatures, the once gay
Florizel died in 1830, as George the Fourth. He lies in
the Royal Vault, but his pretty wanton's bones moulder,
all but forgotten, near the Thames-side towing-path.

Leaving Old Windsor Church behind, the second
turning to the right leads into Windsor town. But
instead of making for the Royal Borough, we will take
the right-hand fork, duly sign-posted, and crossing the
Thames by the Albert Bridge, enter Buckinghamshire.
In half a mile's run by the river bank, Datchet is reached
by turning to the right and so over the level crossing by
Datchet railway station. This is a very much rebuilt
village, which in another hundred years (when its modern
Elizabethan villas have weathered a little) will begin to
be picturesque.

We now take the left-hand road for the old-fashioned
hamlet of Upton, the mother parish of Slough, that
modern suburban town, the " Sloughforwindsor," familiar
to travellers on the Great Western Railway. It may,
perhaps, be remembered that the Slough people, anxious
at one and the same time to show their loyalty and to
suppress the unlovely name of their town, proposed a
few years since to change its title to " Upton Royal,"
but nothing came of the project.

Upton, so near that populous place, is singularly retired.
It has an ancient and highly interesting Norman and
Early English village church, which shares with that of
Stoke Poges the honour of being the scene of Gray's
" Elegy in a Country Churchyard " ; but the tourist who
follows the wheelmarks of the present writer will doubt-

202 Cycle Rides round London

less, like him and the vast majority of visitors to both
places, prefer to think Stoke Poges churchyard the
original. In any case, and however well its " ivied
tower " answers to the description in the poem, it would
be impossible nowadays to deprive Stoke of its fame.

Let not the cyclist by any means omit to look for a
singularly puzzling epitaph on a broken flat stone on
the north side of the church, whose meaning has been
utterly obscured by lapse of time. It runs thus : —

Here Lies the Body of

SARAH BRAMSTONE,

of Eton, Spinster ; a person who dared

to be just in the Reign of

George the Second.

Obijt Jan. ye 30th, 1765. yEtat 77.

This is, indeed, strange, for it is impossible to believe
that law and order were so hard to preserve in the days
of the second George that for a person to " dare to be
just " should be so notable a thing. A popular hymn
urges us to " dare to be a Daniel," but what lions lurked
in the narrow path that Sarah Bramstone trod ? It must
be confessed that this sorely piques the curiosity. We
know what befell Solomon, Julius Caesar, William the
Conqueror, and hundreds of other highly important
historical characters, and know also that even they did
not always dare so much ; but we shall never know the
secret of this tombstone.

Notice, also, on the north side of the church the
white marble tomb of George Fordham, the jockey,
who died, aged fifty, in 1887, with the odd and signifi-
cant quotation, " 'Tis the pace that kills." Those who

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Bepxhes 203

did not know the amiable George might well take that
as an aspersion upon his character ; but Fordham was
the gentlest of jocks and a model husband and father,
and this is but a singularly unhappy phrase in such a
connection.

Leaving Upton Church, we take a road that leads
from opposite it to George Green, crossing the old Bath
road, and over the Great Western Railway. A direct
road runs thence to Langley Park, through whose
recesses there is an entirely unhindered right of way for
self and cycle. Black Park is alone worth the ride ; a
vast stretch of solemn pine-woods, where the breezes die
away in hollow murmurs, or sink to absolute silences
amid the clustered giant trunks. The sunlight filters
down in scanty patches to the carpeting of pine needles,
on whose yielding bed you walk with silent footsteps,
save for the occasional breaking of a dry twig, whose
destruction sounds with startling distinctness in this
solitude. Few ever come to these woodlands, and it
is likely enough that you will have them all to yourself,
excepting, indeed, the wood-pigeons, breaking now and
again into a weird chorus of cooing.

But its great lake of about thirty acres is, perhaps,
the chief feature of Black Park. Seated by its shore,
with the close ranks of the great solemn pines overhang-
ing the sullen water, you see with what appropriateness
the park is named. It is a kind of place where you can
readily imagine yourself a Robinson Crusoe. Little
sandy beaches run out into the water ; the inky recesses
of the woods look as though they awaited the explorer
to come and discover the savages and the big game

204 Cycle Rides round London

that doubtless lie hidden there ; and, in fact, all you
want, to be completely happy, is a raft, a rifle, a suit of
goat-skins, a Man Friday, and some enemies to shoot
at. It is certainly a spot R. L. Stevenson would have
revelled in.

If it were not that Burnham Beeches have to be
reached, nothing could be more delightful than to stay
here the afternoon, taking tea, perhaps, at the " Plough "
at Wexham Street (which must not be confounded with
Wexham village). Leaving the lake at the end where
it borders the road, turn to the right. In half a mile
you reach the pretty hamlet and turn left, then right,
then left again. This brings one into the broad road
leading from Wexham village to Farnham Royal and
Burnham. On reaching this road (which runs right
and left), instead of crossing it, turn to the right, and
then to the left once more. This brings us into a tree-
shaded lane, which dips downwards. On the right, on
the edge of the meadow overlooking this lane, a
momentary glimpse of a solemn, mausoleum - like
monument is caught. This sufficiently notifies the
fact that we are at Stoke Poges, for it is the memorial
erected to the poet Gray by a descendant of William
Penn, who once resided at Stoke Park. The park, of
which the great, odd-looking mansion may be seen
from Stoke Poges churchyard, has belonged to men
of light and leading. It is now the residence of
Mr. Bryant, of Bryant & May, who purchased it
of Mr. Jeremiah Colman, of Colman's Mustard.

The melancholy looking monument, looking like a
tea-caddy or biscuit-box on a pedestal, bears verses

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 205

from Gray's mournful muse — from the " Elegy," and
from the " Lines on a Distant Prospect of Eton College."
Having inspected this, walk a few yards down the lane.
Here a white gate on the right, with an old lodge
absolutely covered from the ground to the topmost
bricks of the chimneys with ivy, appears to lead into
the park. This is, however, the entrance to Stoke
Poges churchyard. Leaving the cycle here, by the
cottage fence, we walk to
this place of pilgrimage
through a very beauti-
ful modern lych-gate in
carved oak. The spire
and " ivy -covered tower "
of the church appear
beyond ; the whole,
strange to say, quite as
beautiful as one expects
it to be ; with the sole
exception that the church-
yard is now too large and
too crowded with staring
white marble monuments

to fully realise the rural note of the famous poem. But
that is a detail. Under the east window, in the church-
yard he has immortalised. Gray is appropriately laid to
rest, in a quiet, unpretending tomb, with his mother
and his aunt.

Thomas Gray, who has come down to us chiefly as
the author of the " Elegy wrote in a Country Church-
yard," as he himself entitles that famous poem, was

GRAYS MONUMENT.

2o6 Cycle Rides round London

born at the close of 1716, the son of Philip and Dorothy-
Gray. Philip appears to have been a " law-scrivener,"
and would seem to have always been on the verge of
madness. He died when his son was twenty-five years
of age. The poet, educated at Eton and at Cambridge,
weakly all his life, and cursed with a melancholy that
was partly real and partly affected, was the only one of
his mother's twelve children who survived their infancy.
Never more than slenderly provided with the means of
living, he dallied through his fifty-four years of life with
the classics, projecting many things but completing few.
His English poems are very few in number, and like
the small total of his writings, few even of these are
more than fragmentary. His morbid nature may
perhaps be guessed from the fact that it was almost
only the death of a relative or friend that would inspire
him to write. Thus the famous Elegy, begun in 1742
and only completed in 1750, owes its conception and its
several slow stages to successive bereavements ; and
the " Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College "
originated in the same doleful manner. Save to
scholars, Gray's whole career and repute as a poet are
comprised within those two poems, both in the very
front rank of English song.

Gray's muse is unhealthy and ill-assorted with the
thought of modern times. Nor was it much better
matched with that of his own. His physique influenced
his temperament ; his narrow and inactive life rendered
him morbid, and finally shortened his days. He died
in 1 77 1. It is credibly said that he never in his life
received more than one single payment of forty guineas

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 207

for literary work. For the " Elegy," on which his
deathless fame rests, he never received, nor would accept,
any pecuniary remuneration. He allowed Dodsley and
the other publishers to print it, which they did, reaping
fortunes thereby. It is, perhaps, scarce necessary to
add that this kind of poet is quite extinct. Gray, who
refused the offer of Poet Laureate on the death of
Colley Gibber in 1757, was of opinion that it was
beneath the dignity of a gentleman to accept payment
for his " inventions." How he would have despised
Tennyson, who could drive a very shrewd bargain with
his publishers, built up a fortune on his writings, and
went into the milk trade !

By the way, it is interesting to read a contemporary
" review " of the " Elegy." Here it is : " An Elegy
wrote in a country churchyard, 4to, Dodsley 66., seven
pages. The excellency of this little piece more than
compensates for its lack of quantity." Who wrote that
** review " ? Was it some draper or grocer, whose
objections to short measure were overcome by the
excellence of the goods?

Here, at Stoke, Gray spent his vacations with his
mother and his aunt. His mother died in 1753. She,
good soul, thought this rickety son of hers — as infirm
of purpose as he was of body — engaged in reading for
the Law, and went to her grave unconscious of his
odes. He loved his mother, and on the lichened slab
that covers the unpretending red brick altar-tomb in
the churchyard you may yet read the epitaph he wrote —
"... beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains
of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of

208

Cycle Rides round London

many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune
to survive her."

The " yew tree's shade " is cast over the south porch
from a very ancient tree of that species, and the scene
generally accords well with the poem. In this connec-
tion, as an additional proof that Gray referred to Stoke
Poges, it may be noted that the spire, surmounting
"yonder ivy-mantled tower," is an addition since his
time, being little over a century old. This would appear
to finally dispose of the claims put forward for Upton

Royal by the sticklers for
absolute accuracy of de-
scription, who have held
that if Gray were writing
of Stoke, he would have
written "spire" instead of
" tower."

The church is very pic-
turesque, and the interior
worth seeing for the sake of
the ancient architecture and
for the curious little fragments of stained glass set in one
of the windows, among them one representing a nude
angel, or wingless cherub, with a monastic tonsure,
blowing a trumpet and bestriding a veritable " hobby-
horse," or primitive bicycle. There is no questioning
the antiquity of the fragment, for the date, 1642, appears
on another portion of the glass, and so the mystery of
the bicycle is unexplained. Every visitor to Stoke
Poges visits Gray's tomb, and no less a matter for
pilgrimage has the so-called " Bicycle Window" become

'HICYCLE WINDOW,
STOKE POGES.

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 209

of late years. Indeed, to those who have no literary
sympathies, this undoubtedly takes the first rank as an
object of interest.

Having seen everything, we retrace our steps to the
road, and, turning to the left, make for Farnham Royal,
where there is a very beautiful modern church, and in
the churchyard an extraordinary monument to a Mr.
Henry Dodd, who died in 1861, "brickmaker and
contractor. Began life as a ploughboy within a mile of
St. Paul's." On the south side of the churchyard is the
grave of Sarah Hart, victim of George Tawell, who
administered prussic acid to her, in 1845, at Salt Hill.
He had been carrying on an intrigue with the woman
and made her an allowance ; but fearing that his wife
would hear of the connection, determined to put her out
of the way. Tawell himself lived at Berkhamsted, in
Hertfordshire. His was an evil career. Living in his
youth a secret dissolute life, he had been sent to penal
servitude in Australia for forgery. Released after a
time, he amassed a fortune out there in business, and
retired. Dark rumours, however, were current that he
acquired a great part of his fortune by poisoning his
partner.

The unhappy woman's grave is unmarked by any
stone, but is the nearest mound to the door in the
churchyard wall. Tawell was the first criminal arrested
through the agency of that then novelty, the electric
telegraph. He rushed off to Slough Station after
committing the crime, and just succeeded in catching
the train to Paddington. He was clad in Quaker dress,
and the telegraphist sent a message up to detain " a man
14

2IO Cycle Rides round London

in the garb of a Kwaker," the original code not contain-
ing the letter Q. He was duly arrested and hanged.

From the church we retrace our steps to the village,
and taking the middle one of three roads, past the
ornamental well-house in the centre of the street, make
for that famous woodland, Burnham Beeches, along a
very winding lane, taking every left-hand turning.
Along a strip of common land, bordered by refreshment
houses, we come downhill to the first glade, where the
giant beeches crowd together in a dim light. The
purchase of Burnham Beeches, unquestionably the
finest piece of natural woodland in England, — finer than
anything in the New Forest or in Savernake Forest, —
was a noble work of the City of London Corporation,
which has thus preserved the spot for ever.

The peculiarly sturdy, stunted, and fantastically
gnarled character of Burnham Beeches is due to their
having been pollarded at some unknown period.
Legends have it that this was done by Cromwell's
soldiers. The inner recesses are weird enough to
suggest warlocks and wizards, or Puck at the very
least, and Queen Mab herself could find no fitter place
wherein to hold her Court than in the crepuscular glades
where, amid that purple shade which is the especial
glory of Burnham Beeches, a chance patch of sunlight
falls, more golden by contrast, on the more than
emerald green of the moss, or where the moonbeams
filter through on cloudless nights to light Her Majesty's
midnight masques. I would not, being no courtier and
unequipped with fairy passwords, adventure alone in
the depths of these woodlands at midnight for anything

To Stoke Poges and Burniiam Beeches 213

you could promise me. At midday it is another
matter.

It is difficult to decide at what period of the year this
spot is most beautiful. It has one peculiar glory of the
summer and another of the winter, when in the short
November and December days the brown leaves that
carpet these alleys give out a mist that mingles
strangely with the coppery glow of the sinking sun.
Amid this impressive coloration the contorted ashen-
coloured trunks stand forth strangely ghostlike.

Gray, of course, knew Burnham Beeches very
thoroughly. His uncle lived at Burnham when the
poet was a youth, and we find Gray writing to Walpole
in 1737, in a lively manner quite unexpected of him
who was already, in his twenty-first year, the affected
prey of melancholy.

But the prig in this precocious young gentleman is
distastefully evident in this otherwise very excellent
description. The description is in fact delightful ; only
one could wish the writer of it forty-one, instead of
twenty years younger : " My uncle is a great hunter
in imagination ; his dogs take up every chair in the
house, so I am forced to stand at the present writing ;
and though the gout forbids him galloping after them
in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and
nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds
me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I
should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My
comfort amidst all this is, that I have, at the distance
of half a mile through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar
call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so,

2 14 Cycle Rides round London

for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a Httle
chaos of mountains and precipices ; mountains, it is
true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are
the declivities so amazing as Dover Cliff; but just such
hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may
venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much
pleasure as if they were more dangerous. Both vale
and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and
other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other
ancient people, are always dreaming out their old
stories to the winds. At the foot of one of these squats
ME {il penseroso), and there I grow to the trunk for a
whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive
squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise
before he had an Eve ; but I think he did not use to
read Virgil, as I commonly do."

The "reverend vegetables" phrase has a strangely
modern flavour, and so indeed has this appreciation
of the picturesque. Before Gray's time scenery was not
only unappreciated ; it was detested. Dr. Johnson, who
hated hills, was at one with his generation in this respect.
Even Horace Walpole, who ought surely to have known
better, calls hills " mountains," and shudders at the sight
of them. Gray has this additional title to fame, that
he was the first to tour in search of the picturesque, and,
in a sense, invented the taste for it. Wordsworth, who
was but little later than Gray, says, "When I was
young, there were no lakes or mountains."

liut it is quite impossible within these limits to
fully describe the Beeches, or to indicate the route
through them. The Corporation has made a magnifi-

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 215

cent series of broad drives in every direction, with
splendid surface for cycling; and if the gradients
are severe, there is nothing that cannot, with due
care, be coasted. Many picnic parties come to the
Beeches, but they rarely penetrate far into these lovely
woodland glades ; leaving the solitudes to the painters,
who are always at work here, producing Academy
pictures. Find the Plain, the Ponds, and Hardicanute's
Moat, away in the recesses of the woods. See " Beauty
and the Beast"; the one being a graceful silver birch,
with a gaunt, knotty, blasted oak standing beside it.
For the rest, given a fine day, be content to lose
yourself here, amid the fairyland of immemorial moss
and lusty bracken, and then, when you are tired of it
(or, more likely, when evening is drawing on), inquire of
one of the artists who are painting the sunset the way
for Farnham Common and Slough. This is a fine
down-grade road of three and a half miles leading
through Farnham Royal down to Salt Hill, where,
turning sharply to the left, we are on the Bath road,
twelve miles from Hounslow. Slough adjoins Salt
Hill. A mile beyond it, up a lane to the left, is Langley.
Langley is a wayside station on the Great Western Rail-
way, set down in a beautiful and secluded neighbourhood,
the name clipped and mutilated in modern railway
fashion, for its full style is " Langley Marish " — " Marshy
Langley," — or, as some would have it, " Langley Maries,"
the church being dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Near
the station notice the old-fashioned inn, the " North Star,"
nestling under the embankment ; a house which obtained
its present sign from the first locomotive ever used on

2i6 Cycle Rides round London

the Great Western. The engine of that name was
originally built for a Russian broad-gauge railway, but
never delivered.

While yet some way from the village, the mellowed
red brick tower of Langley Church is seen across the
flat meadows. The church owns the very singular
feature of an old parish library, contained in a room
within the building ; not a library consisting merely of
a few chained books, but a collection of some five or
six hundred volumes, given by Sir John Kederminster,
under his will of 1631, to "the town" of Langley
Marish, No one ever borrows any of these mighty
tomes for home reading, for they are chiefly black-letter
works of the Greek and Latin fathers, and dry-as-dust
treatises on the Reformation controversy. The room
containing all this bygone learning is curiously painted
with Renaissance designs, and very interesting.

The Kederminsters, of whom this bookworm Sir
John was one, were the old lords of the manor. They
built the beautiful almshouses looking upon the church-
yard. It may be noted that the grouping of church
and almshouses is strikingly picturesque, and that the
low-toned brick is eminently paintable. Langley, in
short, is one of the very few really beautiful and retired
villages so near town.

The curious, who roam the churchyard and read the
epitaphs on the simple memorials of the villagers, will
notice on one of the many wood-rail tomb-" stones" an
inscription to a certain " Mrs. Sarah Wall, the old and
faithful, but ill-requited Servant of Lord Carrington,
who departed this life June 1832, aged 70 years."

To Stoke Poges and Burnham Beeches 217

The story goes that she was grievously affronted by
being consigned by Lord Carrington to one of the.
neighbouring almshouses in her old age, when she had
expected more consideration at his hands. She it was
who directed the expression " ill-requited " to be painted
on the board. A former vicar, disapproving of it, had
the words painted out, but in the lapse of years the
paint of the rest of the lettering decaying, the offend-
ing words have been preserved and stand out with
an extraordinary prominence, attracting immediate
attention.

Pretty hamlets, still wonderfully rural, considering
the short distance from London, line the way home,
along the old Bath road, or lie a little way from it.
Among them is Cranford ; but it is probably^too late
now to see that pretty place, and so we will continue,
through the gathering darkness, along the high road
home. Every cyclist knows this road, but it is not
everyone who knows it when night has fallen ; when
the little inns and cottages take on a romantic interest
they do not possess by daylight; when red blinds in
villagers' windows shed a comfortable ray, and wayside
trees and fields wear an unaccustomed and portentous
significance. In short, it is a delightful lamp-lit journey
along these closing miles, and a pleasantly cool con-
clusion to the heat of the day.

DARTFORD TO ROCHESTER, AYLES-
FORD, AND BOROUGH GREEN

There is an excellent route from Dartford to Rochester,
avoiding the Dover road, known to comparatively few
cyclists other than local — a road that, instead of passing
through places so busy and populous as Northfleet and
Gravesend, is rural through the whole of its course,

BrtRTfORD

STONE
^ GRCENFOiy)

v^YLESFOt\.D

J.tV800;^ME

from Dartford Brent to where it joins the better-known
way at the top of Strood Hill. The Dover road
between these two points is, as just remarked, the
" better-known " route, but it is by no means the oldest.
That distinction can be claimed most emphatically by
this, for it follows the course of that old Roman military

218

Dartford to Rochester, etc.

219

way, the Watling Street, and was a portion of the
route along which went the pilgrims to the shrine of
Thomas a Becket at Canterbury.

Coming uphill from where Dartford is seated in its
deep hollow beside the Darenth, a high tableland is
reached, and with it a parting of the ways. Our own
route is plain to see — straight ahead — and is made
additionally clear by the aid of a specially informative
sign-post. For those, however, who would take the

'^^f^M

opportunity, when so near, of seeing one of the most
interesting parish churches in the country, it may be
hinted that two miles down the Dover road — the left-
hand turning — is Stone. Let the stranger be careful
when inquiring for Stone, and ask specifically for the
church. Otherwise the gaping rustic is apt to smile
significantly. Stone being famed for its lunatic asylums.
The interior of the Early English church at Stone
is a Westminster Abbey in little, designed probably by
the same architect, the stones from the same quarries.

220

Cycle Rides round London

and carved by the same masons. It stands on a hill-
top overlooking the busy estuary of the Thames, near
Greenhithe, and its immediate neighbourhood is made
sordid with cement works and chalk pits. A huge
factory chimney, some six times the height of church

EARLY ENGLISH DOORWAY, STONE CHURCH.

and tower, immediately adjoins the churchyard. When
m the fulness of time it falls, there will probably be
little left of the church, even as a picturesque ruin.

It is not possible to ride round Stone Church to
Greenhithe. The lane leading to it must be retraced,
and the Dover road followed until turnings right
and left appear. To the left lies the little port of

Dartford to Rochester, etc. 221

Greenhithe, and on the right the road leads up again to
our route for Rochester.

Hasting from the scarred, chalky hillsides and the
industries of Stone and Greenhithe, one appreciates
more fully the quiet of this fine road ; and coming in
two miles to Springhead, the Saturday or Sunday

INTERIOR, STONE CHURCH.

cyclist will find that there are others equally appreci"
ative, for the watercress beds and the picnic inns and
tea-gardens of Springhead have been famous in all
Cockaigne during at least the last seventy years, and
the watercresses have by no means lost their freshness
nor the place its charm in that space of time. This

222 Cycle Rides round London

week-end Arcadia, where the succulent prawn, the
cooling cress, and the poetic periwinkle are partaken
of in vast quantities, is still in great esteem. The
manners and customs of its clients are frank, if un-
refined, and their appetites robust, even though their
methods be not particularly nice. To see 'Arriet ex-
tracting periwinkles from their shells with a hairpin is
a lesson in resourcefulness not a little trying.

It is a long climb up to the village of Shinglewell,
which rejoices in having an alias ; for on all maps you
will find the incertitude of cartographers as to what
it really should be called proved by the legend
" Shinglewell, or Ifield." Still uphill, we come to a
turning that will take us off to the right into Cobham
village ; the retreat of Tracy Tupman and his wounded
love, where, in the " clean and commodious alehouse,"
he was discovered by Mr. Pickwick, discussing with a
great appetite and a mournful air a not very senti-
mental meal composed of " roast fowl, bacon, ale, and
et ceteras."

The Leather Bottle is the sign of the inn, and it is
to-day, perhaps, the best known among Dickens land-
marks. It is still the old-fashioned country inn it was
when the great novelist knew and described it, but
filled now with Dickens' relics of every kind. A
painted sign hangs out from the front proclaiming
this to be "Dickens' Old Pickwick Leather Bottle,"
with a picture of that eminent personage in his
" shorts " and gaiters in the inevitable attitude of
declamation. In the low-ceiled parlour are many
prints and portraits having reference to Dickens and

Dartford to Rochester, etc. 223

his works. An old " grandfather " clock stands in one
corner and a stuffed trout in his glass case (an object
without which no country inn is completely furnished)
occupies a place of honour.

It is worth while leaving the cycle at the inn and
to explore the neighbourhood of Cobham village and
park. The village church is well known to antiquaries
as containing the largest collection of brasses in
England. There are no fewer than twenty-four fine
examples, principally to members of the ancient and
knightly family of the Cobhams, who once were lords
of this and many another manor in Kent, and lived at
the Cobham Hall which preceded the Elizabethan and
Jacobean building now standing, the seat of the Earl
of Uarnley. The Cobhams have been extinct for
centuries, and Lennoxes, Cliftons, and Darnleys
have owned the place since, but none of them have
left anything like the impress upon it that the old
family achieved. Here, in the village, is that now
old almshouse, the New College, founded by a
Cobham in place of the Old College, the dissolved
religious house founded many years before by an
ancestor; and there, on the floor of the chancel in
the parish church, are their memorials.

Cobham Park is a lovely expanse of lawns and
woods and grand avenues, open to the wayfarer
freely to come and go. Deer roam about in great
herds, and wild life abounds in the tangled glades.
The Hall is shown only on Fridays. Tickets are to
be purchased at Rochester and Gravesend. To see
the Hall and its great collection of pictures is a quite

224 Cycle Rides round London

separate undertaking from touring on a cycle, and so
we will journey on towards Rochester, regaining the
road and making for a landmark known in all this
countryside as the " Three Crouches." When we
arrive at the place, we discover it to be an inn called
the " Three Crutches," displaying a shield of arms
bearing a chevron between three aces of clubs. The
three aces, distinctly resembling crosses,, are the so-
called " Three Crutches." Compare with this the
name of " Crutched Friars," who were originally the
"crossed friars," from the cross they wore on their
habits ; and with that of the " Crouch Oak " at Addle-
stone in Surrey, an ancient boundary tree standing
at the " cross " roads. The motto, Sub umbra alarum
Tuarum — " under the shadow of thy wings " — is seen
below.

From this point it is chiefly downhill into Strood
and Rochester ; very steeply downhill at Strood, too.
Through its mile-long street and on to Rochester
Bridge, the rude ribs of the ancient castle rise boldly
up from the other side of the Medway, with the
Cathedral beside it, looking quite humble. Very
maritime looks Rochester's High Street, with the
great gilded model of a line-of-battle ship, fully rigged
and armed, that serves for vane, twirling over its
Guildhall. Over all is the bustle, roar, and rattle of
the trains, rolling in thunder over the railway bridge
that cuts off the view downstream.

Rochester, adjoining as it does the busy dockyard
town and seaport of Chatham, is not one of the
slumberous examples among cathedral cities, for its

IS

Dartford to Rochester, etc. 227

narrow and, if truth be told, dirty streets are crowded
with the waggons and carts going to and from raihvays
and wharves. The "Bull Inn " still remains very much
what it was when Jingle recommended it to the
Pickwickians.

The " Bull " itself is exactly hit off in Dickens' de-
scription of it, and in the hall the "illustrious larder
with glass door, developing cold fowls and noble joints,
and tarts wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws
itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a
lattice-wall of pastry," still develops good things for a
later generation. A latter-day stupidity had changed
the name to the " Victoria and Bull," but this has been
remedied recently, and it is the " Bull " once more.

Other things noticed by Dickens in Rochester are
much the same. He calls the projecting clock of the
Corn Exchange the "moon-faced" clock. It still im-
pends over the pavement, and its white dial docs indeed
suggest the moon. But exquisitely exact is that other
description in the " Seven Poor Travellers," where he
speaks of the High Street "oddly garnished with a
queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of
a grave red building, as if Time carried on business
there and hung out his sign." Also, although restora-
tions have since taken place in the darkling cathedral,
no description of it, even now, matches that concise and
breathless commentary the novelist puts into Jingle's
mouth : " Old Cathedral, too — earthy smell — pilgrims'
feet worn away the old steps — little Saxon doors —
Confessionals like money-takers' boxes at theatres —
queer customers, those monks — Popes and Lord

228 Cycle Rides round London

Treasurers, and all sorts of old fellows with great
red faces and broken noses, turning up every day."

You enter the Close directly from the High Street,
beside or through what all readers of Edwin Drood
know as " Jasper's Gatehouse," although the real
name of it is " Chertsey's." The old church of St.
Nicholas, patron saint of fishermen and thieves, who
(the thieves, not the fishermen) were from that circum-
stance known as " St Nicholas' Clerks," stands side by
side with the cathedral, and opposite is the church-
yard. It is well known that Dickens' own wish
was to be buried here, but a national desire that
he should rest in Westminster Abbey prevailed. This
was recalled to the present writer's recollection by a
stranger when recently at Rochester. " He wanted to
be buried there," said the stranger, pointing with his
walking-stick. "'Twould have done Rochester a lot
of good," he added regretfully. " You see, he's wasted
where he is ; but if he was here, thousands more visitors
would come," and he went away grumbling.

One of the chief Dickens landmarks here is, of
course, the place he calls the " Seven Poor Travellers."
This is the charity founded by Richard Watts, in
1579, for the entertaining of "Six Poor Travellers,
who, not being Rogues or Proctors, may receive, gratis,
for one night, Lodging, Entertainment, and Fourpence
each."

But the old city of Rochester requires, at least, a day
for its due exploration, and so we will not linger now
by cathedral, castle, or waterside ; but, turning sharply
to the left, on returning towards Rochester Bridge, steer

Dartford to Rochester, etc. 229

for Borstal ; not by any means because Borstal is
beautiful, because that is probably the very last thing
anyone would think of saying about this place of mean
streets that intercept with their dingy commonplace the
beautiful views along the broad valley of the noble
Medway. Then, as though this were not sufficient,
there is a very grim prison at Borstal — or was, for
it has now been converted into a reformatory; and
then, again, a number of riverside cement works, to
be succeeded at Wouldham by more of the same kind,
and, finally, by brick-kilns at Burham. Why, therefore
(asks the reader), do we come this way? For reasons of
various sorts : because, despite all these disadvantages,
the views, as we cycle along with the broad bosom of
the Medway spread in front for miles and miles, bearing
the rust-red sails of the floundering deliberate barges,
are invisible elsewhere, and because the more rural road,
by Kit's Coty House, is an exceedingly hilly one.
Notice in the churchyard of Wouldham the tombstone
of Burke, the purser of the Victory , for " in his arms,"
as the inscription states, " the immortal Nelson died."

Passing through Burham, take the road to the right
leading down into Aylesford, where the Medway
narrows and is tamely conducted under the fine old
bridge and through a lock, just as though it were a
tiny river and unconnected with the imposing estuary
just left behind. The grouping of river, bridge, square
church tower among the trees, and the long row of
gabled houses beneath is particularly charming. When
you have taken your fill of this characteristic Kentish
scene, proceed along the road leading from the bridge,

230 Cycle Rides round London

and, taking the right-hand turning, come to the broad
highway that leads to Wrotham Heath and Borough
Green, a road that follows in part the valley of one
of the Medway's affluents. Interesting villages lie on
either side, only slightly removed from the road, in
particular that of Leybourne, half a mile on the right
hand. It derives its name from the little stream just
named, the Ley Bourne, originally the Lele or Little
Bourne. It is curious to observe that your true Kentish
man, among such odd enunciations as " d " for " th " (so
that the definite article "the" becomes " de ") still says
" lil " for " little," as the tourist may discover. There
are interesting remains of Leybourne Castle yet to be
seen by turning off the road to the right, and so to the
park in which they stand. But the long day closes,
and we must not linger on the way ; and so, speeding
on to Wrotham Heath and turning there to the left,
we make for the L. C. & D, R. station of Wrotham and
Borough Green.

MIDDLESEX AND HERTFORDSHIRE
BYWAYS

The borders of Middlesex and Hertfordshire are as
yet unspoiled, and still keep their country lanes and
old-world villages in very much their original condition.
This is chiefly owing, of course, to the lack of good
local railway accommodation ; and since these uplands
in the bracing marches of those two counties are thus
left in the most rural and " unimproved " state, we may,
from the tourist's point of view, hope that railway enter-
prise may for long years yet to come lie dormant and
keep the cheap builder away.

In the first instance, however, we must needs be
beholden to the Great Eastern Railway for conveying
self and cycle to our starting-point, Waltham Station,
twelve miles from town. Arrived there, the near
neighbourhood of Waltham Abbey tempts us three-
quarters of a mile across the river Lea into Essex ;
for the great Abbey, now the parish church of the
town of the same name that has sprung up around it
in the lapse of centuries, is a place of pilgrimage.
Harold's body was translated here from Battle, and
although all trace of his resting-place is lost, save the
traditional spot in the meadow by " Harold's Bridge,"
the Abbey is peculiarly associated with him. The

231

232

Cycle Rides round London

massive tower shows up singularly white above the
many old and picturesque houses that converge in
narrow streets upon it ; and the brimming Lea, like
Denham's description of the Thames —

"Without o'erflowing, full,"

goes in the prettiest of perspectives across the fields,
making, with the wayside alders, the old-fashioned
canal-locks, and the many water-channels that every-
where abound, pictures for sketcher or photographer.

WELVVy;/

TEWIN

HERTFORD

/iun/bn

WfliroiiD

As for colour, notice that remarkably old-world square
of bowed and bent, nodding and decrepit houses called
the " Cattle Market." Rarely, indeed, does the painter
find so exquisite a tone as that of these ancient red
brick buildings.

But it will not do to linger at Waltham Abbey,
however great the inclination may be to do so. So we
retrace our course, and passing the station again, come
to Waltham Cross, where the Eleanor Cross, tinkered
by restorers, but still lovely, stands in midst of the road

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 233

beside the old " Four Swans," whose sign, straddling
across the highway, bears the wooden effigies of those
fowls. Turning to the right at this point, and wheeling
through the village of Waltham Cross, a railway bridge
spans the road, and the supremely ugly new station of
" Theobalds Grove" appears. Just beyond this, on the
left-hand side, is a turning which, leading off as it does

TEMPLE BAR.

through gates, looks like a private road into a park. A
park, indeed, it is — that of Theobalds — but there is a
right of way. And it is a most beautiful road, or rather
lane, with the best of gravel surface to cycle along, and
the most gracious of foliage overhead. Half a mile of
this, and then comes the most delightful of surprises ;
nothing less, indeed, than that dear friend of olden days
in London City — Temple Bar.

234 Cycle Rides round London

The story of Wren's beautiful, but inconvenient,
entrance to the City of London is a romantic one.
Long used as a Golgotha on whose topmost cornice
to display the heads of decapitated traitors, it remained
at the Fleet Street entrance to London until the increas-
ing traffic necessitated its removal in 1877. The stones
were all numbered and stored away in the City stone-
yard for some eight years, and meanwhile the City
authorities offered them as a gift to several persons or
public bodies, without finding anyone to accept the gift.
The Benchers of the Temple, who had the opportunity
of securing the relic for one of their quiet courts, in-
credible though it may seem, refused it ; but at last
the old Bar was accepted by Sir Henry Meux, and
re-erected here as an entrance lodge. It is the old
familiar Temple Bar, cleaner than of yore, and more
easily studied in this quiet spot than of old, in the
roaring traffic of Fleet Street; but that it should thus
be banished from its native London and be in private
ownership seems pitiful. Why not, in these days when
it has been proposed to restore the Elgin marbles to
Athens — why not agitate for its restitution and re-
erection in some quiet City lane?

And now for Cough's Oak. There are more ways
than one of reaching Goff's (or Gough's) Oak from
here. Let us take the turning to the left, and, avoiding
a further turn in the same direction, go by Love Grove,
along a series of country lanes. The original Gough
was Sir Theodore Godfrey, who "came over with the
Conqueror," as the musty old phrase goes ; and on
what used to be Cheshunt Common he planted the

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 235

still existing tree, which fully bears out Dryden's

lines —

"The Monarch Oak, the Patriarch of the Trees,
Shoots rising up, and spreads by slow degrees ;
Three centuries he grows, and three he stays
Supreme in state, and in three more decays."

It may flourish for another hundred years if it is only
left alone, although the giant trunk is quite hollow

i;oul;h s oak.

and full of holes, so that it is hooped and banded
round like a barrel to keep it together. The hamlet
that takes its name from this venerable relic is a
thoroughly rural one of farms and dairies, and quite
off the beaten tourist track.

Following the road indicated by the sign-post that
stands prominently near the Oak, we make for Xorthaw,

236

Cycle Rides round London

whose name means " Northwood." The most exhilar-
ating of coasts down through woodlands, with wide
views, blue and beautiful, of woods and parks, leads
to a cottage or two marked " Cufifleys " on the Ordnance
map. Turn to the left here, and so, by a country lane,
to the small village of Northaw, with a modern church
standing on its pretty green. Thence it is as straight
ahead as the winding but splendidly surfaced road

will allow, to Potter's
Bar. Here the Great
North Road is reached.
Continue through the
somewhat characterless
village and turn off to
the right where a sign-
post points to Potter's
Bar Station and South
Mimms, along what is
called Mutton Lane. At
a quarter of a mile from
South Mimms turn to
the left, and the old
church tower presently
comes in sight. Here we find the Holyhead road run-
ning right and left. Turn to the right, and then to the
left off the highway, and up the rising gradient of the
village street. At once the most concise and most
readily understood direction to Shenley is this : " Follow
the telegraph poles."

In under three miles this village is gained — one of
the quaintest and most old-world of places, with an

SHENLEY ROUND-HOUSE.

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 237

old " round-house," or village lock-up, standing between
a horse-pond and the "Queen Adelaide Inn." Local
gossip tells how the last of the long line of petty
offenders to be imprisoned here was the then landlord
of that inn twenty-three years ago. He had, innocently
enough, taken home for firewood a few pieces of wood
he had found in a neighbouring park. So they
locked him up, and the reeking dampness from the
pond nearly killed
him.

Shenley Church
lies a mile away
from the village
and has lost its
tower. The bells,
save one, were re-
moved to the more
accessible Chapel-
of-Ease in the
village, and the
one remains in
the churchyard,
hung in the most extraordinary manner on an iron
bar.

Returning to the village, and having found the way
to Radlett, we go by a winding lane downhill, and
between the two parks of Porters and New Organ
Hall. Radlett is a quite modern settlement, of no
interest. The name, however, is ancient, and derives
from the " Red Leat," a tributary of the Colne, whose
water runs of a reddish hue after rain has washed the

THE CHURCH BELL, SHENLEY.

238 Cycle Rides round London

red gravel soil through which its course lies. Here
we cross the Edgware-St. Albans road and come to
Gill's Hill, a name of dread ; for it was here, at Gill's
Hill Cottage, in 1823, that the notorious murder of
Mr. William Weare was committed by John Thurtell.
A lane on the right hand leads to the still existing
house, and many morbid persons go and feast their
eyes on it, as did Sir Walter Scott in 1828. This
particularly sordid and stupid crime, committed by
the gambler Thurtell, and connived at by his con-
federates. Hunt and Probeft, for mere plunder, aroused
the widest interest, and contemporary literature, not
greatly to its credit, is full of references to the vulgar
tragedy. Scott, as we have seen, actually paid a visit
to the scene, and Carlyle alludes to it again and again.
The thing that most held his imagination and exercised
his sardonic humour was the evidence of one of the
witnesses on behalf of Thurtell, to the effect that "he
was a respectable man : he kept a gig." To " gig-
manity," as a symbol and token of respectability,
Carlyle often recurs.

High Cross, which now comes on our way to
Aldenham, is, indeed, high. Higher still is Kemp
Row, away to the left, the place where the mitred
Abbots of St. Albans hanged criminals literally "high
as Haman," if not, indeed, considerably higher than
that biblical personage. By " criminals " you are to
understand a very wide interpretation — which, in fact,
included such as stole the deer or netted game on the
extensive manors of those dignified clergy. Those
abbots had their gallows as a quite ordinary article

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 239

of domestic furniture, and turned off many an unlucky
poacher with the least possible compunction.

Aldenham is a place with a dignified air, derived
from the many parks that surround it. Aldenham
House is the seat of the recently ennobled Mr. Henry
Hucks-Gibbs, who contended long and expensively in
the Law Courts with that master of gall and wormwood,
Lord Grimthorpe, as to which of them should have
the right to spend a fortune on the restoration of the
reredos of St. Albans Abbey.

From here it is a fine run, chiefly downhill, across
the breezy heights past Patchett's Green and Bushey
Grove to the long village street of Bushey, well known
nowadays for its artistic colony of the Herkomer
School. The builder has been busy here, and Bushey
and Watford are now practically linked together.

Watford is fast losing its old-time individuality in
the amazing extension of Suburbia, but it is still
remarkable to the stranger for its beeriness. Big
bulks the name of Benskin at Watford, and every
third house in the long High Street seems, from a
casual inspection, to be an inn.

A curiosity in the shape of a fig tree growing out of a
large stone altar-tomb in the parish churchyard is the
local marvel at Watford, and if you do not see it, why,
then, no Watfordian will consider his town properly ex-
plored. It may be seen, within a railed enclosure, out-
side one of the church windows, and is, of course, the
subject of a legend. This is the last resting-place, they
tell you, of a lady who on her deathbed exclaimed,
" If there be a God, may a tree grow out of my heart ! "

240 Cycle Rides round London

This shocking and wicked tale is, of course, as absolutely
baseless as the equally wicked and shocking story to the
same effect told of Lady Anne Grimston at Tewin.
The tree is a chance seedling. Anyone malicious or
mischievous enough could create countless such miracles
by inserting seeds in the crevices of such old tombs.

From Watford the way is bordered for nearly two
miles on the left hand by the beautiful lawns and woods
of Cassiobury Park, and here and there ancient elms
form avenues along the road, and lend a grateful and
cooling shade. Cassiobury is the seat of the Earl of
Essex, whose notices, setting forth the dreadful things
which will be done to trespassers, are plentifully displayed
for the length of a mile and a half, and do not add to the
sylvan beauties of the scene. Beyond and adjoining
Cassiobury is Grove Park, the Earl of Clarendon's
seat, just glimpsed in passing. Now the Grand Junction
Canal and the river Gade, flowing in one channel, are
seen on the left, and presently we cross over them,
turning slightly to the left at the hamlet of Hunton
Bridge, A canal is not usually a beautiful object, being
straight and formal, and generally with the common-
place surroundings of coal and other wharves ; but the
Grand Junction, which accompanies the road from this
point to Boxmoor and onwards, provides interest and a
series of charming pictures all the way. Beside it, at a
decent distance, runs the main line of the L. & NAV.R.
to King's Langley.

King's Langley is a village pretty enough, but of no
particular interest ; but the church has a claim to
inspection, containing as it does the altar-tomb of a

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 241

former Duke of York ; Edmund de Langley, fifth son of
Edward the Third, born at the Royal Palace of Langley,
1 34 1, died 1402. It stands in a chapel at the east end
of the north aisle, lighted by a stained-glass window, pre-
sented by the Queen in 1878, in honour of her " ancestor."
Notice stones in the churchyard to various persons
bearing the odd name of Evilthrift. A few fragments
of Langley Palace yet remain on a hilltop a mile distant
from the village.

It cannot be said that the hamlet of Frogmoor End,
which succeeds King's Langley, is beautiful, neither is
Apsley End precisely a poet's dream. They are quite
modern settlements, helping to spoil this once wild and
lonely district of Boxmoor. There is a Boxmoor village
now, and a railway station beside the road, named after
it, but of actual barren moor there is but little.

On the skirts of what was once the moor, we turn to
the right, and in a mile and a half reach the little town
of Hemel Hempstead, through its suburb, Marlowes.
The town is mentioned in Domesday Book as " Hame-
lamestead," and the country folk call it " Hampstead,"
instead of " Hempstead," to this day. Like many of
these little Hertfordshire towns, it is somewhat scrubby
and out at elbows, and is not suflficiently removed from
London to be altogether provincial. Its streets are
steep and run in perplexing and unlooked-for directions,
and its church tower has the characteristic Hertford-
shire leaden extinguisher spire developed to an altogether
surprising height and tenuity.

But if Hemel Hempstead be not particularly inviting
to the cyclist, at least the road that runs thence to Great
16

242

Cycle Rides round London

Gaddesden has supreme charms. Hitherto we have
been on high foads ; here we are on byways bordered
by parks and picturesque hamlets. It is but two miles
from the town we have just left, through Piccott's End

WATER END.

and Water End, to Great Gaddesden. At the beginning
of Water End there is an exquisitely beautiful bit that
Corot himself would have loved to paint ; where a group
of tall, bushy Lombardy poplars hangs over the old
bridge that carries the road over the river Gade, and

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 243

gives a lovely foreground to a view of an ancient
two-gabled, white-faced farmstead amid fertile water-
meadows. To lead one's cycle on to the grass beside
the water and to lie here in the sunshine of a hot
summer's afternoon, lulled by the rippling of the stream
and the purring of the wind among the poplars, is a
delight.

The road now runs past the park of Gaddesden Place,
with the river on the right, and crossing another bridge
with more poplars, climbs a little rise by a few cottages,
and thus, leaving Water End, comes in half a mile to
the very, very small village of Great Gaddesden. How
almost invariably it is the case that places called " Great "
are really microscopically small ! The church and
village lie off to the left, in the level "dene" beside the
Gade, whence the name derives ; secluded, unspotted
from the world. It is an interesting old church, full of
monuments to Halseys and their relatives by marriage :
all, to judge from their epitaphs, the salt of the earth,
which must have lost its savour now they are gone.
The large pieces of pudding-stone that crop up in the
churchyard attract attention in this part of the country.

Leaving the village, make straight ahead across the
road by which you have come, and charge up the hill-
side lane as far as you can. Then get off and walk for
a quarter of a mile, looking back a moment to where
Great Gaddesden nestles in the valley. The summit of
this hill reached, the lane winds in pretty and shady
fashion for a mile, and then descends to a lonely hollow
whence lanes run in three directions. Fortunately, there
is a sign-post here. Follow the lane to Markyate. It

244 Cycle Rides round London

is not at first a very pleasing lane, being rather plen-
tifully strewed with large, smooth, round flints, the
" plums " detached from their native pudding-stone ;
really looking like big kidney potatoes — but harder.
Happily, they soon grow fewer, and leave us free to
enjoy the descent through the wooded dell leading to
the lodge and gates of Beechwood Park. Do not take
either of the roads to right or left, but the narrow lane
ahead, which, although narrow, affords excellent riding.

Flamstead is a mile and a half away. One quarter of
a mile walk uphill, and then the going is quite level on
to the village, situated above a hollow where the little
river Verlam or Ver runs, and therefrom originally named
Verlamstead. It is quite a small place, with a large
church, whose tower has the usual Hertfordshire extin-
guisher spirelet and is daubed with plaster and bolstered
and tied up with red brick debased buttresses and iron
tie-rods ; and altogether, although old, is exactly like
the kind of thing designed nowadays by the very latest
school of unconventional, nightmare architects.

Leaving the church on the right, the road bends to
the left, descends steeply, and then, turning to the
right, joins that broad highway, the old Holyhead road.
Friars' Wash is the name of this junction with that old
highway. It was a place where in days of old, when the
river Ver ran strong, and roads were not so good as
they are now, both friars and other wayfarers occasion-
ally had an involuntary bath.

Turning here to the right hand, and then ascending
the first lane branching off to the left from the main
road, a steep way leads up to the queerly named Fop-

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 245

nuts Green, and on to Kennesbourne Green, where the
Harpenden-Luton road is struck. Speeding to the right
along this, and taking a left-hand turn at Mutton End,
we come steeply down into the valley of the Lea (and
into the Lea itself if we are not careful) at Pickford Mill.

FLAMSTEAD.

The quiet, park-like beauty of Hertfordshire scenery is
in no district more lovely than that mapped out here.
To follow the course of a river downwards is often a
good cycling tip, and one well worth remembering when
studying maps for the purpose of planning tours, for it
gives, as a rule, a descending gradient. The next few

246 Cycle Rides round London

miles of this ride fully bear out these remarks, and, more-
over, afford some exquisite peeps of the Lea, bordered
by picturesque mills. Pickford Mill and Batford Mill
are among the most striking of these. At Batford the
view is especially beautiful.

A lane leads from here to the left, towards Mackery
End, a Charles Lamb landmark. By this very road
that we have come he and his cousin Bridget revisited
the scenes of their childhood some forty years later ; for
it was at the farmhouse of Mackery End that some early
days had been passed with the Gladmans, relatives of
theirs. " Hail ! Mackery End," exclaims Lamb, writing
of this visit, and adding, " this is a fragment of a blank
verse poem which I once meditated, but got no farther."
Just as well, perhaps, because the name and subject
would scarcely seem to lend themselves to the blank-
verse method. The first line, for example, does not
compare favourably with " Hail ! smiling morn," does it ?

The farmhouse of Mackery End can still be seen, but
it is greatly altered. Perhaps the barns and outhouses
at the back are contemporary with Elia. A very inter-
esting old house is this Jacobean mansion to which the
name of Mackery End is generally given, although the
title belongs to the hamlet in general, this being the
" End " in the direction of the wide-spreading parish of
Wheathampstead. It stands solitary in a meadow, and
is dignified and imposing.

Regaining the road from this literary landmark, we
pass watercress farms and watery meadows, and, running
through a little hamlet, come uphill to Wheathampstead
by the railway station. Here turn to the right, and

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 247

through the village, taking the left-hand turn just
beyond the church. It is a long, straggling village,
whose downhill or uphill perspectives are alike pleasing.
The church — one of the largest in Hertfordshire — has
an odd spire ; a whimsical elaboration upon the usual
Herts method which must surely have been of strictly
local design.

Having turned to the left beyond this church, we

are upon the Hatfield road, and on high ground,
overlooking the Lea. Down below, on the other side
of the river, the clustered chimneys and romantic-
looking gables of an old house are seen, surrounded
by the picturesque litter of a farmyard. This is
another Water End, the fine old mansion where
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, that clever and
beautiful shrew, who by turns bullied and coaxed
both her husband and Queen Anne, is said to have

248 Cycle Rides round London

been born ; but the best authorities do not seem to
be very sure of this. Beyond, as we continue along
the road, the towers and spires of Brocket Hall are
seen over the tree-tops. After passing by this park,
we desert the Hatfield road by turning off to the
left ; crossing the Lea again at Lemsford Mills, where
we take a turning to the right. This leads presently
to a fine broad highway, running right and left ; none
other, indeed, than the Great North Road. The right
hand leads to Hatfield, the left to Welwyn, in which
direction we now proceed, uphill, coming in full view
of the more than Roman solidity of the great Welwyn
Viaduct that carries the Great Northern Railway across
the valley of the Mimram stream. It is a steep and
dangerous descent into Welwyn ; dangerous, that is to
say, for the inexpert, for the rash, or the brakeless cyclist.
For the rest it simply needs caution — plenty of it !

Welwyn is an old coaching village, and still keeps
evidences of its past prosperity. These decayed old
coaching towns and villages must needs be a great
deal more interesting now than they ever were when
in the full flush of their success. In the same way,
doubtless, when railways are superseded, the romance
of them will become suddenly apparent. Welwyn
Church is a queer jumble of ancient and modern. The
scorching cyclists who are the curse of the Great North
Road are of the opinion that it is a nuisance, projecting
as it does into the highway at the bend of the road.
So much for the point of view ! Dr. Young, the author
of that doleful book the Night Thoughts, was rector
here, and died in 1765. A constant companion of

Middlesex and Hertfordshire Byways 249

the high -living, punch - drinking, literary patrons of
his age, it seems odd that he should have written
such depressing thoughts over the midnight oil.

Being quiet tourists, we leave the Great North Road
and its crowds of cyclists without a regret, and, turning
to the right by the " White Hart," come immediately
along pleasant byways beside the Mimram. Here we
pass under the great viaduct that for some time past
has been blotting out the surrounding landscape, and
providentially lose sight of it altogether. Crossing the
stream just beyond, the park of Tewin Water is skirted,
and a left-hand turning in the lane where the park ends
brings us across the stream once more, and so to Tewin
village, if one can call that a village whose chief
characteristic is a plentiful lack of houses. There
are legends at Tewin. In a meadow by the church
may yet be seen the foundations of old Tewin House,
demolished many years ago ; and here, it is said, lived
that old Lady Cathcart who was four times married, and
four times left a widow. The first she wed to please
her parents, the second for money, the third because of
his title, and the fourth was put in her way " because the
devil owed her a grudge and wanted to punish her for
her sins." This last venture of hers was disastrous, and
probably prevented her attempting a fifth. It was in
1745 that she married Number Four — a Colonel Hugh
Maguire, who took her to Ireland and kept her shut up
for nearly twenty years ; until, in fact, his death released
her. Perhaps he had seen the posy ring she wore,
which bore the pleasing sentiment —

" If I survive I will have five,"

250 Cycle Rides round London

and tried to spoil her chances. It was about 1765 that
Colonel Maguire died ; and the old lady lived until
1789, dying at the age of ninety-seven. Her ill-treat-
ment would not appear to have crushed her, for she
danced with the utmost spirit at the Welwyn Assembly
Ball in her eightieth year.

Tewin churchyard contains the tomb of another
remarkable lady, that of Lady Anne Grimston, who
died in 17 10. This is a substantial altar- tomb, whence
have sprung seven ash trees. The story has it that
Lady Anne Grimston was a sceptic, and on her death-
bed wished that trees might grow out of her last
resting-place if there was any truth in Christianity.
Accordingly, here are the trees, sure enough ; and they
have broken the stonework and interweaved themselves
with the iron railings in such a manner that they form
a quite homogeneous mass. Many marvel - hunters
come to see these champions of revealed religion ; but
it may shrewdly be suspected that this story, to the
discredit of the lady, has been invented to account
for the trees.

From Tewin the way to Hertingfordbury and
Hertford lies through the lovely park of Panshanger,
the seat of Earl Cowper. Hertingfordbury's name is
about the same size as the village. There are fifteen
letters in the name and as many houses and cottages.
Hertford town, where this run ends, has its picturesque
corners, but the taint of Suburbia has long since
leavened its old-time provincial air.

THE BACK WAY TO BRIGHTON

JVftstmiiitlirrBridM

I Croudoa

There is no lack of ways to Brighton. Every cyclist
knows f/ie way. T/te way is, of course, that by
Croydon, Merstham, Horley, Crawley, Hand Cross,
Albourne, and Bolney; but there are several ways
of reaching London-on-Sea along
good roads. The classic route
already named measures 5i| miles,
and, like every other way, is mea-
sured from the south side of West-
minster Bridge. Let us, by way of
a healthy change, — for change is
the spice of life, — elect to go down
by East Grinstead, Uckfield, and
Lewes ; a route not within the ken
of the scorcher, and for that reason
the more attractive. This " back
way " is but six miles longer than the
orthodox route, and has the advan-
tage of being the most picturesque of
all. It is identical with the other as far as Croydon and
Purley. At that last-mentioned place, rural but a few
years since, but no longer so, the route forks to the left,
going past a compendious sign-post, large enough for
an advertisement hoarding, whereon we may read as

251

LingfiXd

Forest I^ow

Wych Cross
NuUty
M»resyi>|d

L.rri. HorsTccl

Brigfiron

252 Cycle Rides round London

we run the notice : '" To Riddlesdown, the prettiest
spot in Surrey." If we think that to be something
quite apart from the County Council business of
properly sign-posting the roads, and due rather to
private enterprise, we shall be correct; for it points
the way, as a matter of fact, to a paradise of bean-
feasters, and was doubtless placed here by some
enterprising caterer.

The days when local bodies shall be found charged
with the aesthetic mission of guiding to pretty or
historic scenes are not yet.

For five miles the road climbs up and up, on its way
to the crest of the North Downs and Harden Park, past
aforementioned Riddlesdown, where we joyfully leave
the swings and the cocoa-nut shies behind, past Kenley
and Warlingham stations, with the Downs on the left
and a lovely valley on the right, and through
Caterham, where there is a military depot, and where
at the ranges the " recruity " is taught the business
of shooting. There are many Tommies in the making
at Caterham, inchoate guardsmen who have not yet
quite lost the shamble of the civilian or acquired the
carriage of the soldier and the nice conduct of a
swagger-stick.

On the height above Caterham we are on the
crest of the North Downs, J'j'j feet above sea-level, and
after admiring the widespread view southward, may
reap the reward of the long climb in a breathless coast
down two miles of road, past Marden Park, into'
Godstone, an old-world village rejoicing in the posses-
sion of a village green, a pond, and an ancient and

The Back Way to Brighton 253

picturesque hostelry, recently renamed the " Clayton
Arms," but really the " White Hart," established in the
reign of Richard the Second, whose badge it was.

Bane and antidote succeed on this route with un-
failing regularity, and the hamlet of Godstone left
behind, the frowning and tremendous ascent of
Tilburstow Hill confronts the explorer, who may indeed
find a slightly more circuitous and very much less hilly
route for the next three miles by taking the left-hand

THE NORTH DOWNS AND MARDEN PARK.

road past Godstone Station, so called perhaps because it
is three miles from Godstone and only one and three-
quarters from Blindlcy Heath. This easier way falls
into the treadmill route half a mile short of Blindley
Heath, which is a modern hamlet arisen on a scene once
famous, in Regency days, together with the adjoining
Copthorne Common, for prize-fighting contests ; notable
among them, that famous battle in 1819 between the
" Nonpareil " and the " Out-and-Outer," for whose details

254 Cycle Rides round London

the curious reader must be referred to the classic pages
of Boxiana.

New Chapel, a hamlet beyond Blindley Heath, is
succeeded in four miles by the imposing old town of
East Grinstead, a stone-built town of Tudor architecture
where assizes were formerly held. Interest is divided
between the old "judge's lodgings," the noble quad-
rangular group of almshouses known as " Sackville
College," founded in 1609 by the then Earl of Dorset,
and that ancient hostelry, the " Dorset Arms," over
whose doorway there has for some years past ap-
peared a quotation from the present Poet Laureate's
" Fortunatus the Pessimist," placed there by some
landlord more appreciative of the poetry of Mr. Alfred
Austin than is commonly the case. It reads —

"There is no office in this needful world,
But dignifies the doer if well done."

The bearing of this " lies in the application on it," as
Captain Cuttle remarks. Whether it is intended to
convey to the stranger that those of the " Dorset Arms "
are all little emperors, from the landlord down to
" boots," or whether it be a hint that they do you well
in the matter of accommodation, does not appear.

The explorer who elects to stay the night at East
Grinstead, and so continue quietly down the road on
the morrow, will find the town and neighbourhood
delightful, and — what is more to the point for the jaded
Londoner — restful as well. Should he, however, desire
to push a little more forward, the smaller and still more
quiet townlet of Uckfield, some fourteen miles onward,

THE "SACKVILLE LODGING," EAST GRINSTEAD.

The Back Way to Brighton 257

will fit his whim. From half a mile on the other side
of East Grinstead we have been in Sussex, and now the
scenery grows even bolder and the roads more lonely.
At a mile and a half beyond the old assize town, in a
hollow of the hills and beside a stream on the skirts of
Ashdown Forest, the little settlement of Forest Row — a
Bret Harte-ish, Californian-looking place — is gained. A
path to the right, however, by the post-office, leads
across meadows to something that California does not,
but would be only too proud to, possess — the pictur-
esque ruins of an ancient mansion. Brambletye House,
which has sheltered no inmate since the close of the
seventeenth century, when a Compton, the last of its
owners, married a Spanish heiress and left his country
for ever, to reside in the land of the Dons, is the subject
of many legends and has given a title and a motive to a
romance by one of the Smiths, authors of the Rejected
Addresses.

The road, leaving Forest Row, makes its winding way
up to Wych Cross and the high tableland of Ashdown
Forest, and gives some occasion for the use of the
cyclist's muscles. For " forest," let long, long plantations
of oaks and firs, with gorsy and heathery stretches
between, be understood, the whole very solitary. The
ironstone of the district renders the road-surface hard
and excellent for cycling along. This desirable district
is left behind at Nutley, which we leave rapidly behind
on the down grade, and so come to Maresfield, standing
at a parting of the ways. The left-hand road leads to
Uckfield's long, descending street, whose chief feature
is that quaint, old-fashioned coaching inn, the " Maid's
»7

258 Cycle Rides round London

Head," with an immensely long old ballroom provided
with an odd minstrels' gallery at one end. Uckfield
was once a thriving place, and its handsome seventeenth
and eighteenth century mansions along the one street
proclaim that it possessed a cultured society of its own^
quite distinct from its bucolic population. London on
the one side and Brighton on the other, together with
the swiftness and cheapness of modern travel, have
filched away the social circle of Uckfield, alike with
that of many another townlet.

Onward to Lewes, the county-town of Sussex, the

distance is eight miles ; the road beautiful and lonely,
with but one village — that of Little Horsted — on the
way, until quite close to Lewes itself, when the suburb
village of Cliffe is passed. Lewes, with its castle, its
memories of the great battle in the long ago, its quaint
old churches and quainter old houses, piled up against
one another along the steep streets, is a place not to
be hurried through or properly seen in an hour. There
is plenty to see in Lewes, which is a town of closely
huddled together old brick houses, several churches, and

The Back Way to Brighton 259

a grim old castle keep, under which a railway tunnel is
now pierced. There is a monument to that doughty
seaman, Sir Nicholas Pelham, who died in 1559, to be
seen in St. Michael's Church. He successfully defended
Seaford against the French, and the fact is recorded
on his tomb, together with a horrible pun on his
name —

"What time the French sought to have sack't Sea-Foord,
This Pelham did repel 'em back aboord."

The cautious cyclist does not put on too much pace
in these precipitous ways. Rather, being well-advised,
^and with the promise of exertion to come, in the great
wall of the South Downs that rises before him and
seems to forbid farther progress in the direction of
Brighton, does he halt and refresh awhile.

Only one village stands along the eight miles on to
Brighton. Falmer is the name of it, and it is reached
half-way from Lewes. Brighton itself is entered from
the north-east, past the cavalry barracks and by its least
attractive outskirts.

BARKING TO SOUTHEND AND SHEPPEY

Southend is a place that labours under many dis-
advantages. In certain circles, to acknowledge an
intimate acquaintance with that salubrious and healthful
resort is to be suspect of things unutterable in the Bank
Holiday there and back for half a crown way ; and the
name of Southend — the " Sarfend " or " Soufend " of
Cockney speech — certainly brings visions to the mind's
eye of crowded excursion trains or steamboats, where
the holiday - making concertina is much in evidence,
and the mingled odours of shrimps and water-cresses
weight the air as heavily as the scent of the roses in the
rose-garden of Omar Khayyam. I am self-condemned
by these intimate touches, and indeed I know Southend,
and know it in holiday-time and out. I have gone down
by cycle and have come up with the concertina ; have
voyaged from the Port of London to the Port of
Southend, and listened the while (however unwillingly)
to the music of the band on board playing a once
popular ditty called " Three pots a shilling," or some
such romantic title, until, overcome with the exertion, the
rolling of the waves, or the effect of the beer they had
imbibed — or by all three — they ceased, and a holy calm
reigned where the strident cornet and the excruciating

260

Barking to Southend and Siieppey 261

violins had but a moment before cast an added
melancholy upon the sad sea waves.

Southend, however, is a very fine and a very
picturesque place, and extraordinarily bracing ; even
though the sea of " Southend-on-Sea " — as it prefers to
be styled — be indeed half composed of the filthy dregs
of London. To it we will make our way by road.

It is the chief disability of this nearest of London's
seaside resorts that one must needs traverse the whole

of the unlovely East End in order to reach it, and the
cyclist who, like another Strafford, takes for his motto
the proud word " thorough," has no enviable journey
before him in his effort to wheel all the way from town.
From Whitechapel Church lies his way, down the Com-
mercial and East India Dock roads, and on to Canning
Town, where, having crossed the huge iron bridge that
spans the Lea and certain of the docks, he finds himself
in Essex and within eyeshot of such unpoetic land-
marks as Plaistow Marsh, the Northern Outfall Sewer,
and the distant pot-bellied gasometers of Beckton.
Plaistow and East Ham now lie before him, and, passing

262 Cycle Rides round London

these, he comes, across the little river Roding, into the
old town of Barking, seven miles from Whitechapel
Church and on the edge of the country.

There is a mingled agricultural and maritime air about
the distant view of Barking that is not a little alluring ;
and foreground windmills and fields, and distant views
of rust-red sails of barges, peering over ancient roofs,
ill prepare the exploratory cyclist for the raw newness
and meanness that many of its streets display on a
closer acquaintance. Enshrined amid all these modern
excrescences are the old Market House and the still
older Abbey Gatehouse ; this last the sole relic of the
once rich and powerful Abbey of Barking, whose Abbess
in far-off Saxon days owned a seat in the Witenagemote,
the Parliament of that age. It is a mouldering old
gateway, this of the old Abbesses of Barking, and oddly
at variance with its surroundings ; as indeed is the
Elizabethan Market House, now the Town Hall. New
and old at Barking jostle one another very curiously;
the curfew bell still ringing, as a sentimental survival,
during six months of every year, as it did in the bad old
Norman days, eight hundred years ago.

Flat fields, chiefly serving the useful purpose of the
market-gardener, constitute the scenery immediately
next the road on leaving Barking ; but beyond them,
across the turbid estuary of the Thames, made by the
witchery of the sunshine to glitter and sparkle as though
its waters were of the purest — beyond them rise in the
distance the Kentish hills, where the woods of Bostal
look down upon busy Flumstead. One mile from
Barking, and the traveller sees, rising before him on the

Barking to Southend and Siieppey 265

right of the flat road, the dark clustered red brick
chimneys of an ancient mansion : a furtive-looking,
secretive place,- for all its size and the fine Tudor style
of its architecture. This is Eastbury House, long since
abandoned by its owners as a fitting residence, and now
occupied by a market-gardener. It was probably the
solitary position of the old house and its peculiarly
ominous air — as though it could tell a tale an it would
— that originally procured it the reputation of being a
meeting-place of the conspirators in the Gunpowder
Plot. Certainly no scene-painter could devise anything
more likely, by the look of it, to have taken part in some
dread conspiracy. The very bricks seem to ooze secrets,
and in the low doorways and up the darkling staircases
Catesbys and Digbys and Guy Fawkeses might reason-
ably have hidden — only we know they did nothing of
the sort, and that the legends about Eastbury House are
all fudge and flapdoodle, invented to take away the
character of a poor old mansion with no friends of its
own. Still, when, as you explore the place, a terrific
hullabaloo is heard in one of the staircase turrets and a
something black and explosive comes bounding out of
a doorway, the incident has perhaps some little heart-
shaking qualities, due directly to those legends. It is
only when you discover that something to be a spitting
and indignant cat, followed by a fox-terrier, that the
incident resolves itself into the commonplace.

At Rainham — whose beauties and points of interest,
if they exist at all, only reveal themselves to those who
have much time to seek them — we do not call a halt,
but pass on to Wcnnington, similarly circumstanced.

266 Cycle Rides round London

Beyond this place, instead of taking the Purfleet road,
we bear left, and go uphill to Aveley, along a more
secluded way than that by the waterside. Interesting
old churches here and at Stifford will repay examina-
tion and give an interest that the scenery now begins
to lack. For here we are come again to the levels and
now find ourselves in a tract of country that still retains
its old-time name of " Orsett Fen," even though the fen
itself be gone and long level fields take its place. Orsett
village itself partakes of this market - gardening and
cabbage-growing character, and is distinctly rural, with
crazy, weather-boarded cottages a feature of its street.
Here our road turns sharply to the right, and again, at
the " Cock Inn," as sharply to the left along a very
straight, flat, and dreary highway, whose forbidding
character is, however, mitigated by the lovely views of
the Essex hills at Laindon and Horndon-on-the-Hill,
on the left hand, forming a green and well - wooded
range almost at right angles with our course. We have
met those hills before in these pages, and somewhat
more intimately, and know, therefore, that the distant
view of them from these levels is the better part.

Stanford-le-Hope now comes in view, on the other
side of a hollow where a little stream flows to the
Thames, two miles away, past the suggestively named
village of Mucking. Away across the flats comes the
bellowing of the great steamships making for Thames
Haven, or passing up to or down from London ; and
when night has come, the red eye of a lighthouse,
screwed to piles set in the fathomless mud, winks
solemnly at you from out of the vagueness.

Barking to Southend and Sheppey 269

We will pass Vange and Pitsea, on their elevated sites,
without comment, the last-named leading on to Had-
leigh without any intervening village; for Thundersley,
midway between the two, is placed half a mile off the
road. Thundersley is a very small and very inoffensive
little place, in spite of the terrific dignity given by its
name. From the high-placed churchyard of its beauti-
ful but dilapidated little Early English church, the
eye ranges over Benfleet and Cauvey Island, and over

HADLEIGH CASTLE.

a world of waters and muddy creeks, perhaps not
particularly lovely to read about, but beautiful beyond
expression in the sunshine.

But Hadleigh, two miles distant, on its steep hillside,
presenting a stern and rugged upland to the old pirates
who infested the estuary of the Thames in the long ago
— Hadleigh takes the palm for historic interest and
beauty. Nothing shall be said of Hadleigh Church, fine

270 Cycle Rides round London

though it be, and nothing of the Salvation Army's
" Home Colony " for the " submerged tenth," or the
born-tired, or whatever may be the fit and proper
title for " General " Booth's unlovely pets who farm
the surrounding fields ; Hadleigh Castle only shall be
touched upon in these pages. Hubert de Burgh, who
built it, built well and truly when he raised its walls,
nigh upon seven hundred years ago, and so terrible
was the forefront of his fortress, set here on the hilltop,
— the first object that attracted the eye of the would-be
invader sailing up the Thames, — that the foreign foe
on sight of it generally turned tail and fled whence he
had come.

Thus it is that Hadleigh Castle has no history in
the warlike sort. Its very presence was sufficient. Two
hundred years after its towers had been set here to
diadem the green hill, the castle was deserted and left
to decay, as having served its turn ; and since then it
has been a quarry to which everyone in the neighbour-
hood who wanted stone has resorted, so that only the
ruined walls of two circular towers are left. But they
form a striking and memorable picture, whether you
take them for a foreground and gaze thence to Leigh
and Southend and the mouth of the Thames, or look
upon them and the hill from the pastures below.
Constable painted Hadleigh Castle so long ago as
1829, and, truly enough, described its situation as
"vastly fine."

Leigh, that looks so picturesque from this hilltop,
keeps that quality even at close quarters. It is a
shrimping, winkling, cockling, and whelking town, and

Barking to Southend and Sheppey 273

all along its maritime street, where beery fishermen,
very deliberate in their movements, and broad and
patchy in the stern, lounge and gossip, are the most
perplexing little cottages and taverns and bothies, with
spaces large and spaces small in between; and over
all a generous and penetrating scent of shell-fish in
process of being cooked. It is a smell that will not
be denied, and no wonder, since in almost every one
of these little sheds and bothies, and indeed often in
the open air, shell-fish and shrimps are, in fact, being
cooked by wholesale. That is the business of Leigh,
as evidenced by the mountain ranges of winkle and
other shells along the foreshore; permanent and in-
dubitable evidence of the success of the local industry.
To reach this part of Leigh — having come from
Hadleigh, and carefully negotiated the descent of Bread
and Cheese Hill — we turn to the right in midst of the
hilltop portion of the village, by the parish church, whose
tower is so prominent a landmark, and then walk down
the precipitous descent to the fishing community. Be-
tween the seashore of Leigh and that of Southend is
Westclifif — Westcliff-on-Sea as it is proudly styled, or
(still more proudly) " the New Eldorado." Why styled
by so auriferous a name only those responsible for the
alluring advertisements of this newly developed building
estate can tell ; even supposing that they can give a
reasonable explanation. Who that has waited weary
half- hours at London railway stations has not seen
coloured pictorial advertisements of Westclifif; the trees
very green, the houses very red, the sea of a more
cerulean blue than the Mediterranean in the Bay of
18

2/4 Cycle Rides round London

Naples, and all the roads as yellow as fine gold ? Well,
here is the place itself, for comparison.

Southend — maligned Southend, curiously regarded
by superior persons as being throughout the year in-
fested with crowds of the worst type of tripper — lies
basking in the sunshine, sheltered from northerly winds
by rising ground, and looking southward, across where
the Thames and the sea mingle, to the Kentish shore
and Sheppey, six miles away. Excursion trains and
steamboats notwithstanding, Southend, apart from
Saturdays in summer and the usual Bank Holiday rush,
is not the Cockney pandemonium it is generally repre-
sented to be, but a goodly sized and cheerful watering-
plaice, greatly in favour as a residence with many City
men, and, with its mild and dry air, one of the healthiest
of places for children. The cautious scribe would be
afraid to state how far the sea recedes here at the ebb,
and certainly one would not like to say how long
Southend Pier is now. Some years ago it was a mile
and a quarter in length, but since then it has been
lengthened, for the purpose of giving a landing-place
for steamers at the pier-head at all times of the tide.
A pilgrimage from end to end of this structure — doubt-
less the longest of its kind in England — would be a
weariness but for the electric railway that runs its length.
We have now journeyed forty -three miles from
London, but if the summer days be long and weather
propitious, there is no reason why the tour should not
be extended, to include that Isle of Sheppey whose
shores are visible from here. Steamers constantly
make the passage between this and Sheerness.

Barking to Southend and Siieppey 275

Comparatively few cyclists know Sheppey, which is,
in fact, very much of an unknown member of the
British Isles, even to those who are in a favourable
position for reaching it. Does the average man, indeed,
stop to consider that the British Isles, all told, large
and small, number considerably over two hundred?
Of them Sheppey is one of the least remote in point
of mileage, but among the loneliest in actual fact, even
although its capital — Sheerness — is a large and growing
dockyard town.

It is a redundancy to talk of the " Isle of Sheppey,"
because its name, deriving as it does from the Saxon
" Sceapige " (the " Isle of Sheep "), includes the
designation of "island." It is eleven miles in length,
and five miles across its broadest part, and includes the
two so-called " isles " of Harty and Elmley, which, once
divided from it by slimy creeks, are now practically
joined, since modern drainage works have been in
progress. Sheppey is a place of the very greatest
interest. Its scenery, divided into the marshes that
border the Swale, which separates it from the mainland,
and into a high ridge or backbone that runs the greater
length of the isle, from Sheerness to Warden, is of a
peculiarly weird quality, whether you are looking at the
low-lying marshlands or at the dull-hued clayey cliffs
that face the North Sea, and are continually crumbling
away. Trees are few, and grow only in the more
sheltered parts of the island. Landing at the jetty
by Sheerness railway station, under the guns of the
guardship swinging at anchor in the roadstead, and well
covered by a circular iron fort springing out of the water,

276 Cycle Rides round London

we are in the dockyard town and maritime port of
Sheerness, a place, like most towns of the dockyard kind,
squalid and mean, coal-gritty and unlovely. There is,
it is true, another and a better quarter, Bluetown by
name, where the dignified heads of departments and
their kind reside, but it does not lie on our line of
exploration.

Queenborough, off to the right, is worth seeing by
those who have the time. It lies somewhat apart from
modern developments, and looks absolutely the same
now as when Hogarth drew it, over a hundred years ago,
on that down-the-Thames Cockney trip he made with
his friends. That is to say, it consists of one long, broad,
empty, Dutch-like street, lifeless, and looking quite un-
like a place with a history. Originally " Kingborough,"
its name was changed by Edward the Third to the one
it still bears, in honour of his Queen, Philippa.

A fine road leads from Sheerness on to Minster, past
the ligly outlying houses of Miletown. It is with some
surprise that the stranger to Sheppey discovers good
roads here : the instinctive feeling being, apparently,
that coastwise islands are outside the common needs
and conveniences of mainlands.

We may turn to the left and reach the coast over-
looking the Nore, but our especial business now is to
reach Minster, generally called " Minster-in-Sheppey,"
to distinguish it from " Minster-in-Thanet." Minster
stands on the higher lands of the island, and, indeed,
can be seen from almost every point; its great squat
church tower standing on an abrupt hill, surrounded
by the little village of brick and boarded cottages, and

5

Barking to Southend and Sheppey 279

further with a belt of trees. The square gatehouse, all
that is left of the nunnery founded by Saint Saxburga
in early Saxon times, stands by the church, and teas
are provided there for the weary. Glorious views are
obtained from the churchyard ; but it is within the
church that the great interest of the place lies, for the
tomb of Sir Robert de Shurland is here, and here we
are upon the scene of that humorous legend of Barham's
— one of the few of the Ingoldsby Legends written in
prose. The tomb is in the south aisle, the effigy of the
warrior clad in the chain-mail of the thirteenth century.
"His hands," says Barham, "are clasped in prayer:
his legs, crossed in that position so prized by Templars
in ancient and tailors in modern days, bespeak him a
Soldier of the Faith in Palestine. Close behind his
dexter calf lies sculptured in high relief a horse's head."
The local legend upon which Barham founded his story
of "Grey Dolphin" is that the Lord of Shurland,
happening to pass by the churchyard of Minster, found
a fat friar in the act of refusing, unless he was paid for
his services, to say the last rites of the Church over the
body of a drowned sailor brought for burial. The Baron
was not a man with reverence for the dead, or of
particularly deep religious opinions, and had — Barham
tells us in his legend — already seen to it that the dead
sailor's pockets had been turned inside out, with ill
success, for they contained not a single maravedi, but
he was incensed by the refusal to bury him. He promptly
slew the friar and kicked his body into the open grave,
to bear the sailor company. Mother Church was not
particularly fond of the greasy friars who at that

28o Cycle Rides round London

time infested the country, but she could not brook
so flagrant an insult, and accordingly made things
extremely unpleasant for the Baron, who, learning that
the King lay aboard ship two miles off the coast of
Sheppey, swam there and back on his horse, Grey
Dolphin, and obtained a pardon. On returning to the
shore, he met an old woman who prophesied that the
horse who had now helped to save his life should one
day cause his death. To render this, as he thought,
impossible, the Baron killed Grey Dolphin on the spot.
The next year, however, chancing to pass the place, he
kicked against the bleached skull of his old charger, still
lying on the beach, and, a fragment of bone penetrat-
ing his foot, blood-poisoning set in, and he died of
gangrene.

Here, then, is the effigy of the horse's head carved
beside it The Baron's hands are not, indeed, " clasped
in prayer," for his arms have been shorn off by some
vandals at the elbows ; but that is a detail. His sword
and lance lie by his side. " It was the fashion in feudal
times," says Barham, " to give names to swords : King
Arthur's was christened Excalibur; the Baron called
his Tickletoby, and when he took it in hand, it was no
joke."

Sir Robert de Shurland, unlike many of the figures
who flit through the merry pages of the Ingoldsby
Legends, was thus a very real personage. He lived in
the reign of Edward the First, and the fact of his having
been granted " wreck of the sea " may have originated
the story which purports to account for the horse's
head, swimming through waves, carved conspicuously on

Barking to Southend and Sheppey 281

his tomb. " Wreck of the sea " was the right of laying
claim to anything along the foreshore of a manor ; any
flotsam and jetsam that could be reached by the point
of a lance when riding as far as possible into the sea at
low water. Unless thus specifically granted away, the
right of Flotsam and Jetsam along the coasts belonged,
and still belongs, to the Crown.

The legend has acquired for Minster Church the
local name of the " Horse Church," and is alluded to in
the weathervane of a horse's head, surmounted by a
little effigy of a running horse. Before leaving the
building, notice the mutilated effigy, supposed to be that
of a Spanish prisoner who died in durance on board
at the Nore, and also that of a knight, supposed to
be Jordanus de Scapeia, whose clasped hands hold a
mystic oval sculptured with a little effigy symbolising
the soul.

Given calm weather, or with the wind in one's favour,
cycling in Sheppey is a delight, for the roads, with the
exception of this that leads down again from Minster,
are either quite flat or gently undulating, and the surface
is of the best ; and there is practically no traffic to prevent
one bowling along at high speed. But with the wind
against you — and when there is any wind it blows the
greatest of great guns across these unprotected flats —
there is absolutely nothing for it but to walk. After two
miles' cycling from Minster we come to Eastchurch.
Here is a tiny village with a handsome old church, and,
a little distance away, the imposing pile of Shurland
House, a Gothic, red brick, battlemented building, built
by Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports,

282 Cycle Rides round London

about 1550, and the successor of that Shurland Castle
inhabited by the Sir Robert de Shurland whom we have
seen to be the hero of the Ingoldsby Legend of "Grey
Dolphin."

Turning to the left in the village street of Eastchurch,
and bearing to the right at the next turning, Warden
is reached in two miles — what is left of Warden, that is
to say, for the encroachments of the sea have swept
away most of it. All that is left is the inelegantly
named " Mud Row," at whose end a rough bar across the
rutty lane prevents one cycling over the edge of the cliffs
into the sea. Here is a scene of the wildest desolation.
The cliffs, about one hundred feet'high, composed of dark,
greasy, and crumbling clay, have slipped and fallen in
every direction, and the sea at the bottom is discoloured
far but with the debris. For many years past this process
has been going on, and by this time some eighty acres
have been swallowed up and dissolved. In 1836 the
parish church was rebuilt with the stones from old
London Bridge, demolished in 1832 for the building
of the present structure. Delamark Banks, son of Sir
Edward Banks, the contractor for the bridge, gave the
stones and rebuilt the church, as a tablet removed from
it, and now forming part of a garden wall at Mud Row,
tells us. But it was not fated to stand long. The sea
had sapped up to the church by 1870, and it was then
closed. In 1877 it was pulled down, and the heaps of
stones still lie by the beach a mile away. At the same
time, the bodies of those who had been buried in the
churchyard during the previous thirty years were disin-
terred and removed to Minster. But, as the cliffs con-

Barking to Southend and Siieppey 283

tinue to fall, the poor remains of the more ancient dead
are still exposed here, and bleach in the sun : a grisly
sight. It was but a little while ago that the present
writer, visiting the spot, observed children engaged in
the gruesome and morbid occupation of digging out
skeletons for "amusement." And not the children of
ignorant cottagers, for whom there might possibly be

WARDEN POINT.

some excuse, but of people of perhaps some pretensions
to culture and right feeling. Is it not something of a
scandal that the ecclesiastical authorities should allow so
dreadful a thing ? Warden Point, with its village gone
but its older inhabitants still thus in evidence, is a
melancholy place. The sea heaves and rolls in a muddy
discoloration far out, and eats away the island day by
day.

284 Cycle Riues round London

Those who have time may, on returning to Eastchurch,
visit Leysdovvn and Shellness, that low, sandy spit
looking on the map like Spurn Head in Yorkshire. It
looks across the water to Whitstable, and is an historic
spot, sharing with Elmley Ferry the fame of being the
place where that frantic bigot, James the Second, was
captured when attempting an escape into France.
Harty, too, in the flats, may be visited. There is a
good deal of exploration possible, even in Sheppey. For
ourselves, we will just return to Eastchurch, there taking
the left-hand road and following it for four miles, when
a left-hand turn conducts to King's Ferry, which, to the
cyclist seeking the island from London and Chatham,
is the best way of entering. The road is of splendid
quality, running through the sad, sage-coloured marshes
to where a railway bridge on the line from Sittingbourne
to Queenborough and Sheerness — a railway bridge and
a road bridge combined — now spans the ancient
King's Ferry, across the quarter-of-a-mile channel of
the Swale. The toll is cheap — a penny for self and
cycle inclusive.

There are four other entrances, but the King's Ferry
Bridge is the only way by which the cyclist can wheel
across into, or from, the isle. There is a ferry from
Faversham and Oare to Harty, and another from
Sittingbourne and Murston to Elmley.

Five miles of a winding and gently rising Kentish
lane, sandy and bordered with orchards, lead past Iwade.
It is not, evidently, a greatly frequented route, for two
field-gates bar the way, and necessitate a dismount for
opening them. Nearing Newington, a mile of loose

286 Cycle Rides round London

flints induces the man careful of his tyres to get off and
walk ; a change that need be no cause for grumbling
here, for the scene is beautiful, with that soft, rich Kentish
beauty which has earned the county the name of " the
garden of England."

It is an idyllic and peaceful picture that unfolds itself
at Newington, a roadside village, which, like many
another place called " new," is of immense antiquity,
standing as it does on that old Roman military way, the
Watling Street, between Dover and London, and the suc-
cessor of a Roman village. Here the cherry, the pear,
and apple orchards are at their best, and the hop-
gardens are not wanting. Also (another relic of the
Romans, who introduced them from Italy), sweet-chest-
nut trees abound. The ancient parish church is reached
at some distance before the high road : a venerable
building whose mouldering tower is built in alternate
courses of stone and flints. Opposite a postal pillar-box,
within a few yards of the church, notice the so-called
" Devil's Stone," planted at the edge of the road and
footpath. A very fine and large effigy of a boot-sole is
seen on it. The legend runs that the Devil objected to
the church being built, and, placing his back against the
tower, and his foot against this stone, pushed. From
the illustration, in which this stone and the church are
both seen, it will be observed that the Devil must of
necessity have been singularly tall to have performed
this feat — or . to have attempted it. But the builders
had built better than they knew, and the church stood
immovable. The obvious criticism that the stranger
makes on seeing the stone, is that the boot-print is in

Barking to Southend and Sheppey 287

relief instead of pressed into it. There are things well
worth seeing in the old church : brasses and screens, a
copy of the eccentric will of an old-time inhabitant, and
a curious altar-tomb, with a passage through one of its
panels, through which, as a charm, the sick or bew'itched
were passed to cure them. The church is secluded amid
hop-kilns and fruit farms, and backed by a wooded
knoll.

It is a run of seven miles from Newington to Chatham,
through Rainham, identical in name with the Essex
Rainham we have already passed through. One of the
finest panoramas in the world lies stretched out below
this road, on the right hand, the whole of the way : the
panorama, that is to say, of the broad estuary of the
Medway, crowded with vessels, large and small, where
the Might of the Mailed Hand of England is plain to
see, in the big battleships and the smart cruisers that
occupy the fairway. Gazing here, down upon these
evidences of power, you feel that it is good to be an
Englishman, and to have a part and lot in the sovereignty
of the sea thus made manifest. And even as you look
upon these signs of world-admiralty, a tiny white puff
bursts out over the vermicular silver threads where the
creeks run through the marshes, and a hoarse roar
and a simultaneous concussion of air upon your cheek
betoken gun-practice.

A very long and very steep descent leads down from
Chatham Hill into the busy town, past the hideous
unfinished temple of that mad sect, the Jezreelites,
crowning the hilltop and visible for many miles.
Jezreel is dead and his sect moribund, but the evidence

288 Cycle Rides round London

of his hot gospelling and of the folly of his dupes bulks
large in this gigantic pile of bricks and mortar. At
Chatham we join on to other runs, described in earlier
pages of this volume.

Th^ELnd

PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, EDINBURGH

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

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